When to use LiveViewTest vs Playwright

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
, ,
1

LiveView uses Playwright for e2e testing, whilst also shipping with LiveViewTest

They both have there pros, but the biggest ones (to me) are:

  • Playwight - codegen (the ability to interactively create your tests in the browser very quickly)
  • LiveViewTest - (is probably) a lot quicker to run a significant amount of tests & native integration for component testing

I was wondering how other people decide when to use which one, or if they only use either Playwight or LiveViewTest (or another!).

From how I see it, LiveViewTest has the advantage of it being able to do both component and e2e tests, however it’s much quicker (for a developer) to make e2e tests in Playwright.

2

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.

1 Like
3

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.

3 Likes
4

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

7 Likes