How to Pause Tests in Playwright

Playwright's advanced locator mechanism is designed with built-in automatic waiting and retry capabilities, significantly minimizing the occurrence of flaky tests that arise from variable load times.

In most scenarios, utilizing locator actions and web assertions within your tests eliminates the need for manual wait times. These elements inherently possess the ability to wait and retry operations or checks in alignment with your configured timeouts, which default to a 5-second period.

Nonetheless, there may be occasions during test debugging where temporarily halting test execution becomes necessary. For such purposes, you can introduce a deliberate pause as demonstrated below:

// Introduce a 3-second pause
await page.waitForTimeout(3000);

Note that employing the waitForTimeout() method is generally discouraged in when running your production tests, as it can lead to inconsistent test outcomes.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding!

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