Capture and inspect a Playwright trace from a Robot Framework Browser library test suite
domain: robotframework-browser.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Pass a tracing path when opening the context you want to record, e.g. New Context tracing=${OUTPUT_DIR}/trace.zip
Run the suite so tracing starts automatically the moment that context opens
Closing the context (end of test, or an explicit Close Context) finalizes and writes the trace zip file
Open the resulting file with rfbrowser show-trace path/to/trace.zip, which launches Playwright's Trace Viewer
In CI, archive the trace.zip as a build artifact and open it later locally or via trace.playwright.dev
Known gotchas
As of mid-2026 the Browser library only supports tracing scoped to context open/close (tracked in GitHub issue #3427) — there is no dedicated Start Trace/Stop Trace keyword to record just part of a test the way Playwright's native tracing.startChunk() allows
rfbrowser show-trace needs the zip path reachable from the machine running the command; CI jobs that discard artifacts before this step fail with a missing-zipfile error
Tracing noticeably slows execution, so leaving it enabled for an entire suite in CI rather than targeted contexts adds real wall-clock cost
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