feat: migrate ui e2e from robot to playwright

Signed-off-by: bupd <[email protected]>

Author: bupd

proposals/new/ui-e2e-migrate-playwright.md

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+# Proposal: Migrate UI E2E Tests from Robot + Selenium to Playwright
+
+Author: Prasanth Baskar/[bupd](https://github.com/bupd)
+
+Tracking: [goharbor/harbor#22134](https://github.com/goharbor/harbor/issues/22134)
+
+Timeline: ~3 months (one release cycle v2.15 for Phase 1)
+
+## Summary
+
+Migrate Harbor’s UI end-to-end (E2E) tests from Robot Framework + Selenium to Playwright. The goal is to improve test reliability, reduce technical debt, and enable more contributors to participate in test development. Migration will be incremental; existing Robot testcases will remain until equivalent Playwright coverage exists.
+
+## Motivation
+
+### Current challenges
+- Robot testcases rely heavily on XPath and are fragile.
+- Difficult to edit or extend, discouraging contributions.
+- Poor developer experience compared to modern tooling.
+
+### Why Playwright
+- Rich debugging and tracing.
+- Strong community adoption.
+- Accessible for both frontend and backend contributors.
+
+## Goals
+- Replace UI/XPath-based Robot tests with Playwright.
+- Migrate testcases incrementally by multiple PRs in a non-blocking manner.
+- Maintain coverage during migration.
+- Improve contributor experience and onboarding.
+- Retire Robot tests after achieving 1:1 coverage.
+
+## Non-goals
+- Immediate deletion of Robot tests.
+- Creating a single PR including all changes.
+
+> Note: Robot tests will eventually be deleted, but this will occur in a later phase, not during Phase 1.
+
+## Proposal
+
+### Phase 1 – Migration (This Release Cycle)
+(Setup): Add a GitHub Action to run Playwright tests
+- Start with nightly UI Robot tests.
+- Incrementally migrate testcases to Playwright in multiple PRs.
+- Contributors submit migration in multiple small PRs.
+- Robot tests remain until Playwright test cases reach 1:1 parity.
+
+### Phase 2 – Retirement (Next Release Cycle)
+- Plan to retire Robot UI testcases after migrating all testcases to Playwright.
+
+## Requirements
+- Infra Needs: access to AWS Harbor environments for setup (servers, webhooks).
+- Contributors: Community-driven migration.
+
+## Checklist for Phase 1
+- [ ] Add GitHub Action to run Playwright pipeline.
+- [ ] Configure CI to run both Robot and Playwright tests.
+- [ ] Configure CI to run Playwright tests on PRs.
+- [ ] Break down test suite into smaller subtests.
+- [ ] Migrate Robot UI tests to Playwright in multiple PRs.
+- [ ] Ensure main branch stays green (non-blocking, incremental merges).
+- [ ] Achieve full 1:1 parity with Robot UI tests.
+- [ ] Upgrade Angular frontend to latest version.
+- [ ] Ensure all UI E2E cases pass in CI with latest Angular frontend.
+
+## Outcome
+
+- Reliable UI tests.
+- Better developer experience.
+- Easier contributions.
+- Reduced technical debt by retiring Robot + Selenium.