chore: run e2e tests in Playwright container

[latin-panda]

What has been done to verify that this works as intended?

Run CI multiple times with different commits

Why is this the best possible solution? Were any other approaches considered?

• Reproducible locally with Docker. Before, we had differences between local macOS and Linux vs GHA's runner.
  • Downside: we must bump the Playwright image tag when upgrading @playwright/test. It fails loudly if missed, so we'll find out fast and fix it. I consider it worth it because of the improvement made in this branch.
• Before, 6 jobs each downloaded browsers from a CDN, and a job was sometimes canceled when the download was slow. Now jobs use the Playwright container image, so there's no per-browser install step and less exposure to network flakiness.
• One shared cache action, cache keys computed once.
• Removed the node-version matrix, bc it had a single entry and only fed the cache action. Node now comes from package.json (setup-node) and the Playwright image. This is what renames the check names (see below).
• It renames the e2e jobs (drops the node version from the name). The three old names (Test web-forms e2e / Functional e2e (24.16.0, <browser>) are required status checks in branch protection, so after this merges, rebased and newly created branches will show them stuck at "Expected" and can't merge until our GH Admin updates the required check names. The same would happen anyway on any future node-version bump, so it's worth fixing the naming now.
  • To update branch protection, I think it's in Settings -> Branches -> required status checks. I'll also give the team a heads-up.

How does this change impact users? Describe intentional behavior changes from code updates. What are the regression risks?

N/A

Does this change require updates to user documentation? If so, please file an issue here and include the link below.

No

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[latin-panda]

@garethbowen Last week, I had an issue with checks timing out because the browser download took too long, even though the tests weren't broken. I found in Playwright docs that they have containers. So far, it looks good to me. What do you think?

[garethbowen]

Nice find!

To be confident of reliability changes like this we usually run the build multiple times (maybe 100). Have you tried that?

It looks like there are multiple threads here, not just the container change.

Does this also resolve getodk/central#2060 ? @alxndrsn

[alxndrsn]

Does this also resolve getodk/central#2060 ? @alxndrsn

It might very well side-step it, but it doesn't seem to right now:

https://github.com/getodk/central-frontend/actions/runs/34334779372/job/102523218655?pr=1888

2026-09-09T15:13:22.7806563Z [e2e-tester] Playwright: Version 1.60.0
2026-09-09T15:13:22.7807069Z [e2e-tester] Installing playwright deps...
2026-09-09T15:13:23.5450341Z Installing dependencies...
2026-09-09T15:13:23.5541478Z Switching to root user to install dependencies...
2026-09-09T15:13:23.6514198Z Get:1 file:/etc/apt/apt-mirrors.txt Mirrorlist [144 B]
2026-09-09T15:13:23.6958403Z Hit:2 http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble InRelease
2026-09-09T15:13:23.6978958Z Get:3 http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-updates InRelease [126 kB]
2026-09-09T15:13:23.7040767Z Get:4 http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-backports InRelease [126 kB]
2026-09-09T15:13:23.7079522Z Get:5 http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-security InRelease [126 kB]

[garethbowen]

Almost there!

[garethbowen]

Thanks!