playwright-cli: install --skills leaves .playwright-cli/ untracked, and traces there can hold credentials

[diazoxide]

Version

@playwright/cli@0.1.18 (skills generated from playwright-core), macOS 26.2, Node via npx.

Steps to reproduce

mkdir demo && cd demo && git init
npx --yes @playwright/cli@0.1.18 install --skills
git status --porcelain

?? .claude/skills/playwright-cli/
?? .playwright/

…and once anything writes output (a snapshot, a trace), .playwright-cli/ joins them.

What happens

Three directories appear, and nothing is said about any of them:

path	written by	what it is
.playwright/	initWorkspace()	cli.config.json — project config
.claude/skills/playwright-cli/	install --skills	the generated skill
.playwright-cli/	cliOutputDir	traces (trace/), snapshots, screenshots, PDFs

None is added to .gitignore, and the install output does not mention them.

Why .playwright-cli/ is the one that matters

A trace records network requests with their headers and bodies, plus DOM snapshots of
the pages that produced them. So a trace of an authenticated flow contains the credential —
Authorization headers, session cookies, the login POST body — sitting in the working tree
as an untracked directory that git add -A will happily take.

That is not hypothetical for the CLI specifically: the skill documents state-save and a
credentialed login flow, and it supports secret substitution that deliberately keeps
passwords out of the terminal (fields render as <secret>…</secret>). Tracing that same
flow writes to disk what the substitution existed to protect — and nothing warns about it.

The project already does this elsewhere

create-playwright has _patchGitIgnore(), which appends — idempotently, append-only,
under a # Playwright header:

node_modules/
/test-results/
/playwright-report/
/blob-report/
/playwright/.cache/
/playwright/.auth/

/playwright/.auth/ is there for exactly this reason. So this isn't a new policy, just a
gap: the scaffolder patches .gitignore and the CLI installer doesn't, for a directory with
the same sensitivity.

Suggestion

1. Have install --skills call the same _patchGitIgnore treatment for .playwright-cli/
   (and .playwright/, if that is the intended posture). Idempotent and append-only is
   already the established shape.
2. Say a word about the generated skill directory in the install output — committed or not
   are both reasonable, but silence means every project decides it independently, and
   "regenerate rather than edit" makes the choice consequential.

Happy to send a PR for either if the direction is agreeable.

Unrelated small bug, same area

references/tracing.md documents cleanup as:

find .playwright-cli/traces -mtime +7 -delete

but traceDir is path.join(".playwright-cli", "trace") — singular. The documented command
matches nothing, so traces accumulate for anyone who follows it.

[yury-s]

Adding .playwright-cli/ to .gitignore makes sense.