[BUG] Error: Failed to launch browser: Error: spawn ...chrome.exe ENOENT

[davidgilbertson]

Context:

• Playwright Version: 1.0.2
• Operating System: Windows 10
• Node version: 13.12, 14.0, 14.2
• Browser: All

Code Snippet

Using the snippet from getting started:

const { chromium, firefox, webkit } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  try {
    const browser = await chromium.launch();
    // const browser = await firefox.launch();
    // const browser = await webkit.launch();
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/');
    await page.screenshot({ path: `example.png` });
    await browser.close();
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(err);
  }
})();

Describe the bug
In an existing project (that had Cypress installed, not sure if that's relevant), I ran npm i playwright (in Windows Terminal/PowerShell), then ran npm audit fix (I got distracted) and noticed that Cypress re-ran some things. Then I ran the snippet above, and it failed for all three browsers.

I uninstalled Cypress, deleted package-lock.json and node_modules and ran npm i again. Still all three failed. I switched from Node 14.0 to 13.12 (using nvm windows, if that's relevant) and tried again, all three failed, switched to Node 14.2 and now webkit and firefox work (although I admit I'm maybe changing more than one variable between attempts).

My directory C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\ms-playwright\chromium-764964\chrome-win contains only a single file, 84.0.4135.0.manifest. Its contents are:

<assembly
  xmlns='urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1' manifestVersion='1.0'>
  <assemblyIdentity
      name='84.0.4135.0'
      version='84.0.4135.0'
      type='win32'/>
  <file name='chrome_elf.dll'/>
</assembly>

I have Chrome and Chrome Canary (and Edge and Edge Canary) installed on my machine, not sure if that makes a difference.

With Node 14.2 I created a brand new project, installed only playwright, and it failed for chromium but works for firefox and webkit.

Then I deleted C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\ms-playwright and started all over again with Node 14.2 and everything worked. This seems to indicate that during install something is checking if the ms-playwright directory is there, but not checking that its contents are correct.

Lastly, I went back to how (I thought) I started out. Node 13.2, deleted C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\ms-playwright, and ran npm i playwright again and everything worked fine. So after all that I can't pinpoint a specific scenario, but hopefully some of the above is useful in ironing out install kinks.

May I suggest that when running, you check that the correct assets are available and install them if necessary?

Maybe this is a duplicate of #1992 or #1988 or #1085, but they seem different enough that I'll create this as a new issue.

[aslushnikov]

@davidgilbertson hey David, thanks for filing.

This is due to #1988. Due to a node bug, Playwright downloading under Node 14.0 resulted in corrupted browsers, so once you switched to node 13.2 and re-downloaded browsers, everything was working.

In general, Node 14.1 and Node 14.2 are both working fine.