peter
dc4f4f5143
The suite ran only as an admin, so nothing end to end held what a member sees. A second seeded account, a member with its own session, now walks every rail page (no admin entry, no admin call, no error state) and follows links to the admin pages. It found one: a member's link to an admin page showed the feed with no rail row current, and the address bar kept naming the admin page — only the content fell back. The navigation state now derives the page on screen through each module's gate (reachablePage), so the rail, the content, the tab title and the address bar agree, on a link, a Back, and a role taken away mid-session.
E2E characterization (golden-master) net
Playwright tests that lock the app's five core flows — feed (scroll + filter), channel (open → back), player (open/close), settings (dirty-save + guard), and page switching — so the Platform refactor can prove it changed nothing. They assert current, correct behavior; they deliberately do not encode the known Platform bugs (those get their own specs when the sprints that fix them land).
Run
siftlode e2e # against the baked localdev :8080 stack (authoritative)
siftlode e2e-ui # same, Playwright UI mode
siftlode e2e-seed # (re)seed the test account only, no tests
The localdev stack must be up (siftlode dev). global.setup.ts reseeds the account and logs in
once, sharing the session via e2e/.auth/state.json (git-ignored).
A dropped localhost connect — on a Windows host, a burst of test traffic can drop a loopback
connect now and then (every port, any program). The browser resends it and only waits (a loader
outlives an expect timeout); Node does not, so a request from the test side fails with
connect ETIMEDOUT. Those requests go through retryConnect (e2e/retryConnect.ts), which tries
that one error again and passes every other failure straight on. Don't run two e2e suites on the
same machine at once.
Browsers — every flow runs in three projects: chromium (Desktop Chrome), webkit (Desktop
Safari) and ipad (iPad gen 7 landscape: 1080×810, touch, mobile). Install the engines once per
machine with npx playwright install chromium webkit; run one project with
npx playwright test --project=ipad. WebKit catches what every iOS browser inherits from the engine
(JS, CSS/layout, event order). It does not reproduce iPad media refusals: Playwright's WebKit
decodes through the host OS (Media Foundation on Windows, GStreamer on Linux), and measured on
2026-09-14 it played an mp3-in-mp4 and an AV1 mp4 that a real iPad refuses. Check a media format
on a real iPad against the dev stack over the LAN (http://<desktop LAN IP>:8080, e.g. a
login-free /watch/<token> share link).
Target — PW_BASE_URL (default http://127.0.0.1:8080):
-
:8080(baked SPA) is authoritative and same-origin. After a frontend change you mustsiftlode dev(rebuild) for its baked SPA to carry the latest test hooks. -
:5173(Vite dev) serves source live — the fast refactor loop; it proxies/apito:8080, so the stack must still be up. All five flows are proxy-safe:PW_BASE_URL=http://localhost:5173 siftlode e2e
Accessibility — a11y.spec.ts runs axe-core's WCAG 2.x A + AA rules (@axe-core/playwright)
over every rail page, every admin page and the player, in chromium only (the rules read the DOM,
which the engines build alike). It does not judge colour contrast: axe files text on a gradient —
every glass surface — as "incomplete", not as a pass or a hit.
Account & fixture
Tests run as a dedicated admin account e2e@siftlode.local (never a real account;
admin so the suite can reach the admin-only pages / render branches, matching the real primary
user), reset to a deterministic baseline every run by
scripts/e2e_seed.py (run
in-container so it reuses the app's models + argon2 hasher): the top-3 organic channels subscribed,
one in-progress + one watched + one saved video, prefs pinned to language: en. A second account,
the plain member e2e-member@siftlode.local, gets the same baseline and its own session
(e2e/.auth/member.json); only member.spec.ts runs as it, holding what a non-admin sees (no admin
entry, no admin call, an admin link lands on the feed). Credentials come from E2E_EMAIL (default
e2e@siftlode.local), E2E_MEMBER_EMAIL (default e2e-member@siftlode.local) and E2E_PASSWORD
(both accounts) — required, no default: run the suite through the ops wrapper, which exports it
from the secret store. Override the container name with
E2E_API_CONTAINER; skip the in-container seed with E2E_SKIP_SEED=1.
Selectors
The app has no data-testids of its own and all copy is i18n (en/hu), so the specs key on a thin
data-testid layer (added with this sprint) plus the locale pinned to en. Stable ARIA hooks that
already existed are used directly (role="dialog" on the player, aria-current="page" on the
active nav row, aria-pressed on the feed toggles).
Typecheck
npx tsc -p e2e/tsconfig.json --noEmit (the specs are outside the app's src tsconfig).