Introduction

Playwright for Node.js has a canary releases system.

It permits you to test new unreleased features instead of waiting for a full release. They get released daily on the next NPM tag of Playwright.

It is a good way to give feedback to maintainers, ensuring the newly implemented feature works as intended.

:::note

Using a canary release in production might seem risky, but in practice, it's not.

A canary release passes all automated tests and is used to test e.g. the HTML report, Trace Viewer, or Playwright Inspector with end-to-end tests.

:::

Next npm Dist Tag

For any code-related commit on main, the continuous integration will publish a daily canary release under the @next npm dist tag.

You can see on npm the current dist tags:

• latest: stable releases
• next: next releases, published daily
• beta: after a release-branch was cut, usually a week before a stable release each commit gets published under this tag

Using a Canary Release

npm install -D @playwright/test@next

Documentation

The stable and the next documentation is published on playwright.dev. To see the next documentation, press Shift on the keyboard 5 times.

Source: docs/src/canary-releases-js.md