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Prerequisites

Before you can author and run PACE e2e tests, you need the following pieces in place.

What you need​

Node 18+ with corepack​

This repo requires Node 18 or later. Corepack (bundled with Node 18+) pins the package manager to pnpm 11.9.0, so you do not need to install pnpm separately.

Enable corepack if you have not already:

corepack enable

After enabling, running any pnpm command inside the repo will automatically use the pinned version declared in package.json.

Google Chrome (or bundled Chromium)​

Playwright drives a real browser. On macOS and Windows the tests run against Google Chrome (your system installation). On Linux and in CI, Playwright's bundled Chromium is used instead.

Install the browser after cloning:

# macOS / Windows — install system Chrome via Playwright
pnpm exec playwright install chrome

# Linux / CI — install bundled Chromium and set the channel
pnpm exec playwright install chromium

When using Chromium on Linux set PW_CHANNEL=chromium in your environment (or in .env) so that Playwright targets it by default.

The sibling pace-ui-application checkout​

PACE E2E contains no application source code. When an AI agent authors or updates a test it needs to look up selectors, field names, route paths, and component contracts from the application code.

Check out the app repo next to (as a sibling of) this repo:

parent-directory/
  pace-e2e/           ← this repo
  pace-ui-application/  ← app repo must be here

The default path is ../pace-ui-application. You can override it with the PACE_APP_REPO environment variable if your checkout lives elsewhere.

An AI host​

The agentic test-authoring framework works with four AI hosts:

  • Claude Code — Anthropic's official CLI
  • Codex CLI — OpenAI's command-line agent
  • Gemini CLI — Google's command-line AI tool
  • Antigravity — an alternative agent host

You need at least one of these installed and authenticated. See Choose your AI tool for a side-by-side comparison.

Summary checklist​

  • Node 18+ installed, corepack enable run
  • pnpm exec playwright install chrome (or chromium on Linux) completed
  • pace-ui-application checked out as a sibling directory
  • At least one AI host installed and authenticated