Been using Playwright for a while and kept running into the same frustration - before you can understand anything about how it works against a real site, you've already spent 20+ minutes scaffolding a project, installing deps, configuring the test runner, and creating a spec file.

I wanted something where I could just point it at a URL and start poking at the Playwright API directly. Couldn't find it, so I built it.

It's called Trywright. Runs locally as a daemon at localhost:3333. You give it a URL, pick a browser (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit), choose headed or headless, and you get a live Playwright session with a REPL wired directly to the page object.

# What it's not

It doesn't generate test code, doesn't record actions, doesn't replace Playwright's own codegen or UI mode. Those tools assume you're already writing tests. This sits one step earlier, for exploring and learning the API before you've committed to writing anything.

Install if you want to try it:

npm install -g trywright

macOS and Linux only for now. Node 20+.

Website with docs: [trywright.dev](https://trywright.dev)

Genuinely curious whether this scratches an itch for anyone else or if I've just been solving my own problem. Happy to answer questions about how it works under the hood.

Built a free local control panel for exploring Playwright without setting up an IDE - feedback welcome