Is this how I suppose to use Playwright with Litestar?

[hasansezertasan]

Hey everyone! 👋✨ Hope you’re all having an amazing day! 😄

I’m currently building a microservice that generates images from HTML, and after some research, Playwright looks like the perfect tool for the job! 🚀🖼️

Since this service will be running in the cloud and response time is super important, I decided to hook Playwright into the application lifecycle using lifespan events in Litestar, so the browser is always up and ready to go. ⏱️🌐

I put together a minimal reproducible example (MRE) to share with you all and would love to get your thoughts and feedback! Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.13"
# dependencies = ["litestar", "uvicorn", "playwright"]
# ///
# mypy: disable-error-code="type-arg"
"""Minimal Litestar application with Playwright integration."""

from __future__ import annotations

from contextlib import asynccontextmanager
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING

import uvicorn
from litestar import Litestar, Request, get
from litestar.response import Response
from playwright.async_api import Browser, Page, async_playwright

if TYPE_CHECKING:
    from collections.abc import AsyncGenerator


@asynccontextmanager
async def lifespan(app: Litestar) -> AsyncGenerator:
    """Lifespan context manager to handle Playwright setup and teardown."""
    async with async_playwright() as playwright:
        browser: Browser = await playwright.chromium.launch()
        app.state.browser = browser
        yield
        await browser.close()


@get("/")
async def main(request: Request) -> Response[bytes]:
    """Main endpoint that returns a greeting."""
    browser = request.app.state.browser
    page: Page = await browser.new_page()
    await page.set_content("<h1>Hello, World!</h1>")
    img = await page.screenshot(full_page=True)
    await page.close()
    return Response(content=img, media_type="image/png")


app = Litestar(
    route_handlers=[main],
    lifespan=[lifespan],
)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8080)  # noqa: S104

Since I’ll be rendering my own HTML content (not fetching from external URLs), the request lifespan should be super short and the response almost instant. ⚡️

I chose to use lifespans because I’ve had some experience with Starlette Lifespan State, and after checking out the Litestar docs, it seemed like a good fit here too.

Has anyone tried something similar, or have any tips, tricks, or best practices to share? Would really appreciate your insights! 🙏💡

Thanks so much in advance! Looking forward to hearing your ideas! 😊🙌