Is Remote / SSH or Remote / Container development supported?

[tfenster]

Is Remote / SSH or Remote / Container development supported?

[alexkuc]

@mxschmitt What if remote supports headed mode, e.g. X11 forwarding? Would browser-related tasks work then?

[mxschmitt]

Just to clarify, there are as of today multiple ways of using a VSCode extension:

• Container -> debug is not supported
• SSH -> debug is not supported
• WSL -> fully supported
• normal / host -> fully supported

In your scenario you are using containers, where debug is not supported. Why? Because when you debug, it will launch a headed browser, for that you need a GUI to see the browser and the playwright inspector, which you don't have in the container OR you can't control inside the container. Its kinda related to this one microsoft/playwright#16961 but debugging in headless, does not make much sense too,

[tfenster]

Ah sorry, I mixed up WSL and containers (cause Linux containers are also using WSL as backend on Windows, but obviously still not the same)

[ccll]

In your scenario you are using containers, where debug is not supported. Why? Because when you debug, it will launch a headed browser, for that you need a GUI to see the browser and the playwright inspector, which you don't have in the container OR you can't control inside the container.

Is it possible to run headed browser with xvfb for rendering, and let user connect to the remote GUI with VNC to view/debug/control the tests?

It looks like Selenium docker container is doing headed rendering like this.
https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/docker-selenium

If this is possible in Playwright, it would be a huge improvement for remote development workflow.

[mxschmitt]

First of all, I really love Playwright, thanks a lot for this awesome extension!

Happy to hear!

Since debugging spawns a headful browser on the host OS, its not fully possible as of today due this contract.

The same happens with Remote / Container with a WSL2 container on Windows. Same question here, am I missing something or is this not supported?

WSL2 support should be fixed in version 0.2.6 which was released a few minutes ago.

(There was a separate issue that the HTML report was not opening, this was an issue in Playwright, which you can fix by using the dev version: npm install @playwright/test@next.

[tfenster]

@mxschmitt Great news, thanks. However, when I try to do this now with a container and the updated extension, I get

Do I need to do some setup / config on the Windows side for this to work?

[bennettdams]

@mxschmitt What do you think about adding these runtime environment statuses to the README? I think it could be really helpful.

• Container -> debug is not supported
• SSH -> debug is not supported
• WSL -> fully supported
• normal / host -> fully supported