playwright

🎭 playwright

Microsoft's Playwright image with Node upgraded to 26.

The official mcr.microsoft.com/playwright images ship Node 24 in every variant (noble, jammy and resolute alike). That is fine for running the Playwright test runner, but not for serving an app that needs a newer runtime — anything relying on the native Temporal API, for example, throws Temporal is not defined on Node 24.

This image keeps the browsers and system libraries from the official image and replaces Node with 26, so a single container can both serve the app under test and drive the browser. No browser downloads at pipeline run time.

🛠 Usage

Woodpecker CI

steps:
  e2e:
    image: git.eleith.com/eleith.private/playwright:1.61.1-node26
    commands:
      - pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
      - pnpm build:packages
      - cd apps/web && pnpm run test:e2e

Docker

docker run --rm -v "${PWD}":/app -w /app \
  git.eleith.com/eleith.private/playwright:1.61.1-node26 \
  pnpm run test:e2e

✅ Verifying a build

docker build -t playwright:test .
docker run --rm playwright:test node --version              # v26.x
docker run --rm playwright:test ls /ms-playwright           # chromium_headless_shell-1228
docker run --rm playwright:test node -e "Temporal.Now.instant()"

The last one is the point of the image: it throws ReferenceError on the stock Node 24 base. The Dockerfile's closing RUN node --version && pnpm --version fails the build if the runtime was not replaced, so a green build already covers most of this.

🏷 Tags

Releases are tagged playwright/vX.Y.Z, which publishes the semver tags plus a descriptive one naming what is inside:

1  1.0  1.0.0  1.61.1-node26

The descriptive tag comes from the Dockerfile. See Releases for latest and publishing.

⚠️ Version pairing

Playwright refuses to run when the browsers on disk do not match the version of @playwright/test the project installs — it fails with Executable doesn't exist at /ms-playwright/chromium_headless_shell-NNNN.

The base image tag and the project's @playwright/test must be bumped together:

image tag	bundled chromium	pair with
v1.61.1-noble	1228	@playwright/test@1.61.1

To move to a new Playwright release, change the FROM tag here, tag a release, and bump the dependency in the consuming project in the same change.

⚠️ corepack

pnpm is baked in via corepack at build time. Setting COREPACK_HOME in a pipeline step points corepack at an empty directory, and it will re-download pnpm on every run — leave it unset to use the bundled copy.

A project whose packageManager field pins a different pnpm version will also fetch that version at run time. Rebuild with --build-arg PNPM_VERSION=… to bake in a different one.

📦 Tech Stack

• Base: mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.61.1-noble (Ubuntu 24.04)
• Browsers: chromium, firefox and webkit at /ms-playwright
• Runtime: Node 26 (nodesource), corepack, pnpm 11.9.0