skills/playwright-ephemeral/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
playwright-ephemeral	Provision and tear down ephemeral Playwright MCP browser sessions as Kubernetes Jobs for E2E testing.

Ephemeral Playwright Browser Provisioning

Provision an ephemeral Playwright MCP browser session running in a Kubernetes Job. Use this when you need to drive a real browser for E2E or integration testing.

Prerequisites

Requirement	Description
kubectl	Must be available and configured with cluster access
RBAC	Agent service account needs Jobs and Services CRUD in playwright-sessions namespace
Network	Cluster networking must allow traffic from agent pod to playwright-sessions namespace

When to Use

• You need to drive a real Chromium browser (click, navigate, screenshot, scrape)
• You are running E2E or integration tests against a web application
• You need a Playwright MCP server endpoint to connect your MCP client to

Provision a Session

Run the provision script. It creates a Kubernetes Job + Service pair and waits until the Playwright MCP server is accepting connections.

RESULT=$(bash ./playwright-ephemeral/scripts/provision.sh)

On success, the script prints two lines to stdout:

SESSION_NAME=playwright-<agent>-<uuid>
MCP_URL=http://playwright-<agent>-<uuid>.playwright-sessions.svc.cluster.local:8931/mcp

Extract the values:

SESSION_NAME=$(echo "$RESULT" | grep '^SESSION_NAME=' | cut -d= -f2)
MCP_URL=$(echo "$RESULT" | grep '^MCP_URL=' | cut -d= -f2)

Optional Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
PLAYWRIGHT_NAMESPACE	playwright-sessions	Kubernetes namespace for browser pods
PLAYWRIGHT_TIMEOUT	120	Seconds to wait for the MCP server to become ready
PLAYWRIGHT_TTL	1800	TTL in seconds after Job finishes (auto-cleanup)
PLAYWRIGHT_DEADLINE	1800	Hard ceiling in seconds for the Job (kills zombie sessions)
PLAYWRIGHT_MEMORY_REQUEST	512Mi	Memory request for the browser container
PLAYWRIGHT_MEMORY_LIMIT	1Gi	Memory limit for the browser container

Connect to the Session

Configure your Playwright MCP client with the returned MCP_URL. The endpoint speaks HTTP-based MCP transport on port 8931 at the /mcp path.

Example: if MCP_URL=http://playwright-goose-a1b2c3.playwright-sessions.svc.cluster.local:8931/mcp, point your MCP client at that URL.

Tear Down a Session

When you are finished with the browser, tear it down:

bash ./playwright-ephemeral/scripts/teardown.sh "$SESSION_NAME"

This deletes both the Job and Service. If you forget, the Job self-cleans after PLAYWRIGHT_TTL seconds and hard-terminates after PLAYWRIGHT_DEADLINE seconds.

Error Handling

Scenario	What Happens
Pod fails to schedule	Provision script times out and exits non-zero with an error message
MCP server not ready in time	Provision script times out and cleans up the Job/Service before exiting
kubectl not found	Script exits immediately with an error
Namespace does not exist	Script creates the namespace automatically

Security Notes

• Each session runs in an isolated pod with its own network identity.
• Sessions are ephemeral — the Job TTL and active deadline prevent resource leaks.
• The browser runs with --no-sandbox (required in containers) and headless Chromium only.
• No data persists after teardown.