Configuring HTTPS Certificates in Playwright

Most of us talk about following best practices while writing any code . We say that it is good to develop code that is written following all the best practices . However , most of us are actually facing challenges in configuring the client side certificates in the test automation framework . Most of us tend to use the ignoreHTTPSErrors: true setting to make things work. However that is not the right and correct way of implementing a best practice

Problem: When trying to access https sites that require custom client certificate , if we do not use the ignoreHTTPSErrors: true flag in our code and just copying the certificates in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ ,we see the below error

In this article , I would share the way to use client certificate in playwright framework in gitlab ci where in we are going to use the docker image : mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.35.0-jammy

Playwright which is built on top of puppeteer framework internally uses NSSDB to access the certificates.

In the gitlab-ci.yml, mention the following :

image: mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.35.0-jammy
stages:
 test #test suite automation run stage
test:
  stage: test
  tags: [shared]
  before_script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get install build-essential -y
    - apt-get install libnss3-tools # setting up certutil
    - echo $HOME
    - mkdir -p $HOME/.pki/nssdb
    - certutil -d $HOME/.pki/nssdb -N --empty-password
    - curl -k <url to download the pem file from>- create-dirs -o /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/CertificateName.pem
    - certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "C,," -n CertificateNickName -i '<path of the pem file>';
    - update-ca-certificates --fresh
  script:
    - yarn install
    - yarn playwright install
    - npx playwright install msedge
    - source set-env.sh
    - yarn playwright test - workers 6
  artifacts:
    paths: #assuming deafult playwright artifacts paths
      -./playwright-report/
    when: always

The before_script section contains the configurations that must be done in order to be able to use client certificates. Certutil is a command-line tool in used to manage certificates and cryptographic services. It handles various operations, including installing, backing up, and verifying certificates, and more.