Caching browser binaries

GHA caching docs recommend caching the NPM / Yarn cache (~/.npm / yarn cache dir), which does not have browser binaries. This means that the binaries are downloaded on every CI execution, which can be optimized. With the @actions/tool-cache package, this Action can potentially implement caching for binaries.

What this could look like:

• Define the PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH environment variable to specify a fixed location for the binaries to be downloaded
• Cache this location with tc.cacheDir(dir, 'playwright-browsers', playwrightVersion) (docs)
• Restore at the same location with tc.find (docs)
• This would require defining runs.post in the action.yml, like the actions/cache does it here. However, this bit is not documented in the metadata syntax reference for GHA ~(is it for some whitelisted actions only?)~
  • Verified with #11 that runs.post will work

Alternatively, we could achieve caching in user-land by reusing the cache action (this could be an MVP implementation):

• Set the PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH to a certain path, and use the same path with the cache action
• Use the cache action in the workflow (this will end up being duplicated, since users will have a caching action for npm/yarn already)

- name: Cache browsers
  id: cache-browsers
  uses: actions/cache@v1
  with:
    path: <same as PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH>
    key: key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('package.json') }}

[jesstelford]

For caching binaries on GitHub Actions, see https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/7249#issuecomment-1154603556

(Sorry for the zombie post; this issue comes in as the top result when searching for Playwright cache binaries, and I wanted to point weary travellers [such as my future self] in the right direction)

[mxschmitt]

Currently its not planned to cache browser’s. It’s different on each language binding and depends on the version.

If you still want caching, you can do it manually with https://github.com/actions/cache A Cache key: playwright version (or whole file e.g. package.json, requirements.txt etc.) Cache folder: https://playwright.dev/docs/browsers#managing-browser-binaries

As written above, this can be also leveraged using the PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH environment variable.