Playwright Plus MCP server

The Playwright MCP Server provides browser automation capabilities through the Model Context Protocol, allowing for web navigation, screenshots, element interaction, and HTML/text extraction functionality.

Installation

Installing the Package

The Playwright MCP Server can be installed using Python package managers. The recommended approach is to use uv or pip:

pip install playwright-server

After installation, ensure that Playwright browsers are installed:

playwright install

Configuring Claude Desktop

To use this server with Claude Desktop, you'll need to configure it in your Claude desktop configuration file.

On MacOS:

Edit the configuration file located at:

~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

On Windows:

Edit the configuration file located at:

%APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Configuration Options

For published server:

"mcpServers": {
  "playwright-server": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": [
      "playwright-server"
    ]
  }
}

For development/unpublished server:

"mcpServers": {
  "playwright-server": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": [
      "--directory",
      "path/to/playwright-server",
      "run",
      "playwright-server"
    ]
  }
}

Usage

Browser Navigation

Navigate to websites using the playwright_navigate tool:

playwright_navigate(url="https://example.com")

This will automatically create a new browser session if one doesn't exist.

Taking Screenshots

Capture screenshots of web pages:

# Full page screenshot
playwright_screenshot(name="homepage.png")

# Screenshot of a specific element
playwright_screenshot(name="login_button.png", selector="#login-button")

Interacting with Elements

Click on elements using selectors:

# Click using CSS selector
playwright_click(selector="#submit-button")

# Click element containing specific text
playwright_click_text(text="Sign Up")

Fill input fields with values:

playwright_fill(selector="#username", value="user123")
playwright_fill(selector="#password", value="pass123")

Executing JavaScript

Run custom JavaScript in the page context:

playwright_evaluate(script="return document.title")

Extracting Content

Get text content from the page:

# Get text from all visible elements
text_content = playwright_get_text_content()

# Get text from specific element
element_text = playwright_get_text_content(selector=".article-content")

Get HTML content:

html_content = playwright_get_html_content()

Working with Notes

The server also implements a note storage system:

# Notes can be accessed with the custom note:// URI scheme
# The summarize-notes prompt can create summaries of stored notes

You can control the detail level of note summaries by providing a style argument (brief/detailed).

How to install this MCP server

For Claude Code

To add this MCP server to Claude Code, run this command in your terminal:

claude mcp add-json "playwright-server" '{"command":"uvx","args":["playwright-server"]}'

See the official Claude Code MCP documentation for more details.

For Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > Tools & Integrations and click "New MCP Server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "playwright-server": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": [
                "playwright-server"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explicitly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.

For Claude Desktop

To add this MCP server to Claude Desktop:

1. Find your configuration file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

2. Add this to your configuration file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "playwright-server": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": [
                "playwright-server"
            ]
        }
    }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop for the changes to take effect