Launch Chromium with a specific profile

[emyann]

I've seen that --user-data-dir has been recently supported, thanks a lot for that! 🎉

On Playwright's documentation I see that we can pass browser's custom args, allowing to use --profile-directory on Chromium to target a specific profile. I've been through the code but I don't think it is supported yet, am I right?

The reason I'm looking for that feature is that I would like to avoid to mess with my main profile, and have a configured profile for automation purposes.

Please let me know whether this makes sense or not 🙏🏽

[pavelfeldman]

Sounds like the behavior you desire is what already happens by default if no flags are passed. See https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp?tab=readme-ov-file#user-data-directory. By default you get a dedicated profile for automation that is different from your regular browsing profile.

[emyann]

Thanks for the quick reply @pavelfeldman 🙏🏽

You're totally right that Playwright creates a dedicated automation profile by default when no flags are passed, and that behavior works well for many cases.

However, my use case is a bit different — I’m trying to reuse a preconfigured profile, one that already includes things like session cookies and account logins (e.g., Gmail), so I can automate tasks within that environment.

Right now, starting from a clean state makes it difficult to create and maintain a usable profile through automation. For example:

When I try to authenticate to Gmail, the browser is flagged as automated and blocked by Google.

Because of this, I can’t configure the profile via Playwright itself — I’d need to configure it manually via regular Chromium, then point Playwright to it.

But without support for --profile-directory, I can't target that manually created profile reliably inside the user data directory.

So essentially, the lack of --profile-directory support makes it hard to reuse a named, preconfigured, and functional profile that was created outside of Playwright for automation purposes.

Would love to hear your thoughts or know if there's a recommended workaround for this kind of setup 🙏🏽