Playwright from Scratch — A Complete Setup Guide with TypeScript and POM

Playwright is the best end-to-end testing framework available today. This guide walks through setting up a production-ready framework — not just the hello-world install, but the structure and patterns you'll want when your test suite scales to hundreds of tests.

Installation

npm init playwright@latest

Choose TypeScript, place tests in tests/, and add a GitHub Actions workflow.

Project Structure

tests/
├── e2e/              # test specs
├── pages/            # Page Object Models
├── fixtures/         # custom fixtures
├── helpers/          # shared utilities
└── data/             # test data
playwright.config.ts

Page Object Model

Each page or component gets its own class. This isolates selectors and keeps tests readable.

// pages/LoginPage.ts
import { Page, Locator } from '@playwright/test';

export class LoginPage {
  readonly emailInput: Locator;
  readonly passwordInput: Locator;
  readonly submitBtn: Locator;

  constructor(private page: Page) {
    this.emailInput   = page.getByTestId('login-email');
    this.passwordInput = page.getByTestId('login-password');
    this.submitBtn    = page.getByTestId('login-submit');
  }

  async login(email: string, password: string) {
    await this.emailInput.fill(email);
    await this.passwordInput.fill(password);
    await this.submitBtn.click();
  }
}

Custom Fixtures

Fixtures handle setup and teardown cleanly, and make POMs available across all tests.

// fixtures/index.ts
import { test as base } from '@playwright/test';
import { LoginPage } from '../pages/LoginPage';

type Fixtures = { loginPage: LoginPage };

export const test = base.extend<Fixtures>({
  loginPage: async ({ page }, use) => {
    await use(new LoginPage(page));
  },
});

Configuration

Key settings for a production config:

// playwright.config.ts
export default defineConfig({
  testDir: './tests/e2e',
  fullyParallel: true,
  retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
  workers: process.env.CI ? 4 : undefined,
  reporter: [['html'], ['allure-playwright']],
  use: {
    baseURL: process.env.BASE_URL || 'http://localhost:3000',
    trace: 'on-first-retry',
    screenshot: 'only-on-failure',
  },
});

Conclusion

This structure scales. As your test suite grows, the POM pattern keeps selectors centralized, fixtures keep setup DRY, and the config handles environment-specific behaviour cleanly. Start here and you won't need to refactor later.