Attach an rrweb replay to every Playwright failure on a PR

What you’ll end up with

Every failed Playwright run uploads its tracelane-reports/*.html as a workflow artifact. A reviewer downloads it, opens the single file in any browser — fully offline — and scrubs the rrweb replay (with the console + failed-network panels) to the exact failure, without cloning the branch.

Prerequisites

• An existing Playwright project (@playwright/test >= 1.40)
• A GitHub Actions workflow running that suite
• Node >= 22

Steps

1. Install

npm i -D @tracelane/playwright@0.1.0-alpha.2

2. Register the reporter in playwright.config.ts

import { defineConfig } from '@playwright/test';

export default defineConfig({
  reporter: [
    ['list'],
    ['@tracelane/playwright', { mode: 'failed', outDir: './tracelane-reports' }],
  ],
});

3. Use tracelane’s test/expect in your specs

import { test, expect } from '@tracelane/playwright/fixture';

The fixture is auto — every test in files that import this test is recorded; no per-test wiring.

4. Upload the reports from GitHub Actions

      - name: Run Playwright tests
        run: npx playwright test
      - name: Upload tracelane replays
        if: ${{ !cancelled() }}
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: tracelane-reports
          path: tracelane-reports/
          if-no-files-found: ignore

5. Push and watch the PR

On the next failed run, open the run’s Artifacts → download tracelane-reports → open the .html. The replay opens offline; scrub to the failure, including across page navigations (recording continues through page.goto).

Why this works

The fixture records the run with rrweb (DOM + console + failed-network captured in-page on every browser, enriched by CDP on Chromium) and, on failure, writes one self-contained HTML file per test into outDir. actions/upload-artifact ships those files as-is — no replay server, no cloud bucket, no npx playwright show-trace.

Next steps

• Debug a flaky checkout test in CI
• Triage a CI run with 200+ failures
• Share a failing test with a developer