Using Playwright to test my static sites

I build a lot of static websites – including this site and all of my local media archives – and I want to test them. Most of my pages are static HTML and I can write automated tests that analyse the HTML, but for more complex sites I have JavaScript that runs in the browser and modifies the page. The only way to test that functionality is to open the page in a browser, click around, and see what happens. I could do that manually, but it quickly gets tedious. To automate this process, I’ve been using a testing framework called Playwright, which is designed for this sort of end-to-end testing. It’s a tool that allows you to programatically control a web browser, look at the contents of a page, and make assertions about what’s there. Playwright can be used to test or script any kind of web app; I’m using it for static sites because those are the only web apps I have. Playwright is available as a CLI, or there are libraries to use it with TypeScript, Python, .NET, and Java. All my other…