When to use LiveViewTest vs Playwright

For e2e tests, there is also Wallaby.

It’s all about whether you want a battery-included solution or you are OK with doing/maintaining a part of the setup yourself. LiveViewTest as you mentioned is a unified tool for all your phoenix test needs, it requires zero setup if you have a phoenix project, but at the same time it’s obviously not as flexible as using the dependency directly.

To me the biggest consideration is that if you need to execute your js hooks then you’ll need a full e2e runner like Playwright or Wallaby since LiveViewTest runs only the Elixir code.

There’s currently work happening on phoenix_test to make playwright another driver for it, so switching to it would become a config switch.

Here’s the mentioned Playwright driver for PhoenixTest:

defmodule Features.RegisterTest do
  use PhoenixTest.Playwright.Case

  @tag trace: :open                      # replay in interactive viewer
  test "register", %{conn: conn} do
    conn
    |> visit(~p"/")
    |> click_link("Register")
    |> fill_in("Email", with: "f@ftes.de")
    |> click_button("Create an account")
    |> assert_has(".text-rose-600", text: "required")
  end
end