End-to-End Testing with Playwright

Playwright drives a real headless Anki instance via its mediasrv HTTP API. Tests live in ts/tests/e2e/ and are entirely separate from the Vitest unit tests.

Prerequisites

Build Anki at least once before running e2e tests:

just build

That's it. just test-e2e automatically installs Playwright's Chromium browser into out/playwright-browsers/ on the first run (idempotent on subsequent runs).

Running tests

Managed mode (CI-style)

Playwright starts and stops a throwaway Anki instance automatically:

just test-e2e

The first run can be slow (~60 s) because Anki must fully initialise before tests start.

Reuse-server mode (recommended for development)

Start Anki once in a separate terminal, then reuse it across multiple test runs:

# Terminal 1 — keep running
./run

# Terminal 2 — fast iteration
ANKI_E2E_REUSE_SERVER=1 just test-e2e

Interactive UI mode

Open Playwright's browser UI to inspect each test step with snapshots:

ANKI_E2E_REUSE_SERVER=1 just test-e2e --ui

Writing tests

Add test files to ts/tests/e2e/ with the .test.ts suffix and import from ./fixtures instead of directly from @playwright/test:

import { expect, test } from "./fixtures";

test("my feature works", async ({ page }) => {
    await page.goto("/some-anki-page");
    await expect(page.locator("#some-element")).toBeVisible();
});

fixtures.ts re-exports expect and a pre-configured test object. Add shared fixtures there as new features require them.

Calling the Anki API from tests

Anki's /_anki/ endpoints accept and return protobuf-encoded binary payloads (Content-Type: application/binary). Use page.request.post with Buffer.from(protoMsg.toBinary()) and decode the response with the matching generated type from ts/lib/generated/.

Accessing Anki pages

Anki's mediasrv serves the following pages over HTTP (non-exhaustive):

CI

The e2e tests run as part of the check-linux job in .github/workflows/ci.yml, after the regular build and test steps. Screenshots and traces from failed runs are uploaded as artifacts and kept for 7 days.