E2E Testing

Generate and run end-to-end tests using natural language.

Paragon generates and runs Playwright tests from plain English. Describe what you want to test, and Paragon handles the rest.

Quick Start

Just tell Paragon what to test:

Test the checkout flow with an expired credit card

Paragon writes the Playwright test, runs it, and opens an HTML report with video recordings and tracing so you can see exactly what happened.

How It Works

1. Describe the test in natural language
2. Paragon generates Playwright tests and saves a scenario to paragon.json
3. View results with video recordings, tracing, and screenshots

Tests run on your actual machine with your real environment variables, secrets, and local services.

Running Saved Tests

Once a scenario is saved, run it anytime:

paragon test

Run exported Playwright E2E tests locally from the terminal. This command wraps npx playwright test with your paragon-tests/ configuration and handles authentication with Polarity for agentic test steps.

paragon test [file-pattern] [flags]

Prerequisites

Before running paragon test, make sure:

1. You're authenticated — run paragon auth login if you haven't already. Agentic test steps require a valid Polarity session.
2. You have a paragon-tests/ directory in your project root containing a playwright.config.ts. Export your tests from the Paragon Dashboard to generate this directory.
3. Playwright is available — the command runs via npx, so Playwright will be resolved from your project's node_modules or fetched automatically.

If the paragon-tests/ directory or playwright.config.ts is missing, the command will exit with an error and point you to the dashboard to export your tests.

Basic Usage

# Run all tests in paragon-tests/
paragon test
 
# Run a specific test file
paragon test login.spec.ts
 
# Run multiple files or use glob patterns
paragon test auth.spec.ts checkout.spec.ts
paragon test **/*.spec.ts

The optional [file-pattern] argument accepts one or more file paths or glob patterns. When omitted, all tests in the paragon-tests/ directory are run.

Flags

Examples

# Run all tests against your local dev server
paragon test --url http://localhost:3000
 
# Watch tests run in a visible browser
paragon test --headed
 
# Filter to only run tests with "login" in the name
paragon test --grep "login"
 
# Run a single file in Chrome only
paragon test checkout.spec.ts --project chromium
 
# Retry flaky tests up to 3 times with a longer timeout
paragon test --retries 3 --timeout 120000
 
# Step through a test interactively with the Playwright Inspector
paragon test --debug --headed
 
# Open the full Playwright UI for exploring all tests
paragon test --ui
 
# Combine flags for a targeted local run
paragon test --url http://localhost:3000 --headed --grep "checkout" --workers 4

Running Against Production

Use the --url flag to point tests at a deployed environment:

# Run against a staging environment
paragon test --url https://staging.yourapp.com
 
# Run against production
paragon test --url https://yourapp.com --project chromium --retries 2

You can also set the PARAGON_TEST_URL environment variable instead of passing --url each time:

export PARAGON_TEST_URL=https://staging.yourapp.com
paragon test

When --url is provided, it takes precedence over the env var.

Default Playwright Configuration

Exported tests come with a pre-configured playwright.config.ts that includes sensible defaults:

Test results including videos, traces, and screenshots are written to a test-results/ directory.

Use --ui mode for the best local debugging experience — it gives you a visual test explorer with a built-in trace viewer, video playback, and DOM snapshots.