Why a Test Automation Framework? (Playwright + TypeScript, Ch.1)

Welcome to the first chapter of a hands-on course where we build a production-grade Playwright + TypeScript automation framework — covering both API and UI testing — against a real, dockerized web app you run on your own machine. This isn't a "here are 5 Playwright tips" post. By the end of the series you'll have a framework with the same shape a real QA team ships: layered, parallel-safe, authenticating once and reusing the session, seeding data through the API and verifying it in the UI, and running sharded in CI. We build it one chapter at a time, and every line of code is in a public repo you can clone and run. Who this is for You can read basic JavaScript (variables, functions, async/await ). That's it. No Playwright or TypeScript experience required — we introduce both from zero. You've maybe written a few UI tests before and felt them turn into a tangle. This course is about the structure that prevents that. How the course works Each chapter is one post in this series, in order. Read them top to bottom. There's a companion GitHub repo — the single source of truth for all code: 👉 https://github.com/aktibaba/playwright-qa-course The repo carries one git tag per chapter ( ch-01 , ch-02 , …) so you can check out the exact state of the code at any point and compare it to what you have. Every chapter ends with what changed, so you can either build along or just read the diff. Get the code and run the app We don't test toy pages. The course runs against Inkwell — a small but real React + Express + PostgreSQL blogging app (articles, comments, tags, follow/favorite, JWT auth). It lives in the same repo under sut/ ("system under test") and ships as a one-command Docker stack with deterministic reset / seed endpoints, so your tests never race startup or fight flaky data. You'll need Node.js 18+ and Docker . # 1. Clone the course repo git clone https://github.com/aktibaba/playwright-qa-course.git cd playwright-qa-course # 2. Start the app (db + API + web), wait until eve