record video only for failed tests using playwright's use.video retain-on-failure option
domain: playwright.dev · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
add use: { video: 'retain-on-failure' } to playwright.config.ts, or the object form { video: { mode: 'retain-on-failure', size: { width, height } } } to also constrain resolution
run the suite normally; Playwright records a video for every test but only keeps the file for tests that ultimately failed
confirm video files are written under the configured outputDir (test-results by default) and attached to failed test entries in the HTML report
for retried tests, verify the video of the failing attempt is retained even if a later retry passes
adjust size in the video option if recordings are too large for CI artifact storage limits
Known gotchas
recording a video for every test run (even passing ones, before deletion) still incurs CPU/disk overhead during the run, which can slow down large suites
video mode is separate from the mid-test page.video()/screencast controls; retain-on-failure is a whole-test capture, not a manually start/stopped recording
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