How have I never heard of this! This is awesome!
I never even thought that automating a browser would be a thing!
It’s based on Puppeteer which has been around awhile. It’s pretty useful for automating UI tests.
sounds like userscripting with extra steps
Also, here is another cool project that mounts your browser tabs as a filestructure https://github.com/osnr/TabFS
Cool project! I’ll check it out.
Regarding userscripting, from the F.A.Q.:
Why use an external automation tool (Playwright) instead of a browser extension?
While Beachpatrol allows to control the browser from both the OS and from a browser extension, our priority was the OS. Therefore, something like Playwright was the natural choice.
Furthermore, while controlling the browser from an extensions is possible, Manifest v3 removed the ability to execute third-party strings of code. Popular automation extensions like Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey could also be affected by Manifest v3. The alternative is to embed the code into the extension, but that would requires re-bundling the extensions after every change. Other tricks do exist to make this approach work, and there is some hope for future Manifest v3 solutions, but this path is certainly tricky.
It is more likely that Selenium and related tools will continue to work in the foreseeable future given the business demand for traditional browser testing.
Yeah, just use firefox.
This sounds a lot like Selenium
Sounds cool but I didn’t really get how it works from the README, or I guess didn’t get a proper example. They showed that you can automagically log into website but that can also just be done with a password manager.
Unlike a password manager that just logs you in, Beachpatrol can run any automation task, like checking your email, downloading files, or filling out forms. You have to create Playwright scripts for these tasks and run them from a shell command. There is an example script already in the commands folder, which you can run with the command
beackmsg smoke-test. The sky is the limit, basically.Thanks, I missed the example. Tbh I think advertising “checking your email” sounds kinda stupid, people interested in this tool will probably use email clients and other software which is specifically designed for auto-email stuff.
Amazing
