MCP client for `playwright` failed to start

Open 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 10, 2026 by artvinn

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.98.0

What subscription do you have?

Business

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.2-codex

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

Alacritty

What issue are you seeing?

Starting codex with configured Playwright MCP gives error:

MCP client for `playwright` failed to start: MCP startup failed: handshaking with MCP server failed: connection closed: initialize response

⚠ MCP startup incomplete (failed: playwright)

It used to work just a few days ago though, maybe an update has broken it. I have it setup via config.toml:

[mcp_servers.playwright]
command = "npx"
startup_timeout_ms = 20_000
args = ["@playwright/mcp@latest", "--extension"]

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Configure playwright MCP
Start up codex via CLI

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 6 months ago

You mentioned that it worked previously. Could you try downgrading to confirm whether it was a regression in Codex? If so, what was the first version where you see the problem? It's also quite possible that something changed on your system (e.g. a configuration setting or environment variable) that caused this, so it's important for us to isolate the cause.

AndreaPi · 6 months ago

@artvinn BTW, I found that the Playwright skill (with playwright-CLI installed ofc) works just as well and uses way less tokens

bitToQubits · 5 months ago

I have personally found that just re-executing the installation command codex mcp add playwright npx "@playwright/mcp@latest solves the issue. The directory must have playwright installed on it.