Run Playwright on Steel Cloud Browsers

Playwright is Microsoft's cross-browser automation library. The Steel integration attaches Playwright to a Steel cloud session over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, so the rest of your script — page.goto, locators, expect, tracing — drives a remote browser with stealth, proxies, and a live viewer instead of a local Chromium.

No playwright install, no headful display, no Chrome on your machine.

Requirements

• Steel API Key: Active Steel subscription
• Runtime: Node.js 20+ or Python 3.10+
• Package: playwright (TypeScript) or playwright (Python)

Connect Steel to Playwright

Pass Steel's CDP URL into chromium.connectOverCDP(). Steel returns a context with a page already open, so reuse browser.contexts()[0] instead of creating a new one:

import { chromium } from "playwright";
import Steel from "steel-sdk";

const client = new Steel({ steelAPIKey: STEEL_API_KEY });
const session = await client.sessions.create();

const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(
  `${session.websocketUrl}&apiKey=${STEEL_API_KEY}`,
);
const page = browser.contexts()[0].pages()[0];

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
from steel import Steel

client = Steel(steel_api_key=STEEL_API_KEY)
session = client.sessions.create()

playwright = sync_playwright().start()
browser = playwright.chromium.connect_over_cdp(
    f"{session.websocket_url}&apiKey={STEEL_API_KEY}"
)
page = browser.contexts[0].new_page()

Full runnable starter: Steel + Playwright recipe →

FAQ

Resources

• Playwright documentation – Official Playwright docs for TypeScript and Python
• Steel Sessions API reference – Technical details for managing Steel browser sessions
• Steel Discord – Get help and share what you build