Debug a CI-only Playwright test failure by capturing and inspecting a trace.zip in Trace Viewer
domain: playwright.dev · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Set trace: 'retain-on-failure' (or 'on-first-retry' combined with retries) in playwright.config so traces are saved only for failing runs, keeping CI artifact size manageable
Upload the resulting trace.zip as a CI artifact after the test run completes
Open it locally with npx playwright show-trace trace.zip, or drag it into trace.playwright.dev without installing anything
Step through the action timeline, before/after DOM snapshots, console logs, and network requests together to find where behavior diverged from expectations
Use the trace's Call tab to see exact locator resolution and source line, often faster than reproducing the failure on a local machine
Known gotchas
Traces recorded only with 'on-first-retry' won't exist if a test fails once with no retry configured — use 'retain-on-failure' or enable retries in CI
trace.playwright.dev processes the zip entirely client-side in the browser; very large trace files can be slow to load
Screenshots embedded in the trace reflect the CI machine's actual rendering, so viewing a CI trace locally on a different OS can show visual differences even when DOM state matches
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