Context:

• Playwright Version: 1.30.0
• Operating System: GitHub Actions with ubuntu-latest
• Node.js version: 18.14.0
• Browser: All

Running Playwright on GitHub CI with Node 18.14.0 I kept running into ECONNREFUSED errors and finally a timeout:

Describe the bug

2023-02-09T15:42:40.206Z pw:webserver HTTP GET: http://localhost:8888/
2023-02-09T15:42:40.207Z pw:webserver Error while checking if http://localhost:8888/ is available: connect ECONNREFUSED ::1:8888
2023-02-09T15:42:40.207Z pw:webserver Waiting 1000ms

Error: Timed out waiting 60000ms from config.webServer.

I managed to fix it after lots of googling and finding this: node-fetch/node-fetch#1624

Apparently, "there was a breaking change in node v17 that changed the default IP resolving. ip6 is preferred by default," and because of it, trying to access http://localhost:8888 wouldn't work while explicitly using http://127.0.0.1:8888 would.

The other option would be to override the default DNS behaviour to prioritise IPv4, which I did by putting this at the top of the Playwright config file:

import dns from 'node:dns'
dns.setDefaultResultOrder('ipv4first')

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a Playwright issue, in which case you can close this issue right away. At the very least it'll be helpful for others (and future me) running into the same problem.