Orchestration (v1)

Playwright Orchestration Setup Guide for Currents v1

This page documents orchestration flow for deprecated v1 version of Currents. See Migration Guide.

Orchestration helps decrease the duration of Playwright tests in CI pipelines. Read our detailed guide on Playwright Parallelization that compares native sharding with orchestration.

How does it work

@currents/playwright contains a command-line executable pwc-p — a lightweight wrapper that implements Orchestration and runs Playwright behind the scenes.

• it scans the testing suite

• it establishes an orchestration session with Currents servers

• it runs Playwright, executing spec files in the optimal order

• the results are recorded to Currents for troubleshooting and analysis

Setup

Install @currents/playwright:

npm i @currents/playwright

Replace playwright with pwc-p:

npx pwc-p --key <record-key> --project-id <project-id> --ci-build-id <ci-build-id>

pwc-p accepts additional Playwright arguments and flags (see @currents/playwright), for example:

# Add additional playwright arguments and flags:
pwc-p --key <record-key> --project-id <id> --ci-build-id <build-id> -- --workers 2 --timeout 10000

Read more about CI Build ID and Reporting Strategy.

There's no need to define shards. Remove the --shard flag — Currents uses all available machines automatically.

A successfully created orchestration prints an output similar to this:

$ npx pwc-p --key **redacted** --project-id **redacted** --ci-build-id `date +%s` -c ./or8n/playwright.config.ts

🚀 Starting orchestration session...
📦 Currents reporter: 1.1.2 recording CI build 1712134904 for project JJzd65, orchestration id 260264cfa16950ab4dc98d5c54333136
🎭 Playwright: 1.42.1 5 tests in 1 project [chromium]

🌐 Executing orchestrated task: [chromium] spec-or8n-e.spec.ts
🌐 Run URL: https://app.currents.dev/run/9b93659915fe653f
# ...start executing the tests in an optimal order.