Start exploring a web app

exploration.startChanges dataCreates, updates or deletes something in your workspace.

What it does

Starts an exploration session: a recorded walk through a running web app to discover its pages, links and forms, which can later become test cases. You need a browser tool on your side (for example the Playwright MCP server); Test Maze never opens a browser itself, it only keeps the record and tells you what to try next. Returns sessionId, budget and nextActions (the first is always "navigate to the url", actionId "a0"). Next: open the URL in your browser, then call exploration.observe. Sessions with no observe for 30 minutes are closed automatically as abandoned.

Ask your agent

You don’t call exploration.start yourself. Say something like this to Claude Code, Cursor or another MCP-connected agent:

  • “Explore my app at http://localhost:3000 and find all the pages”
  • “Click through the checkout flow on staging and record what you find”
  • “Crawl the signup flow and turn it into test cases”

Inputs

NameTypeDescription
url
required
stringStart URL of the running app, e.g. "http://localhost:3000" or "https://staging.example.com/login".
goal
optional
stringWhat you want to learn or check, in plain words, e.g. "Find every page reachable from the dashboard". Stored with the session and used in generated case descriptions.
featureId
optional
stringId of the feature (test suite) this exploration belongs to, from feature.list. exploration.to_cases returns it as suiteId so the cases land in that suite.
name
optional
stringShort session name for lists. Default: the first 80 characters of goal, or "Exploration of <url>".
budget
optional
objectLimits for the session, e.g. { "maxSteps": 30, "maxPages": 10 }. Defaults: 60 steps, 25 pages. When either is reached, observe stops suggesting actions and sets coverage.done = true.

The MCP call

What the agent’s MCP client sends (placeholders in angle brackets):

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "exploration.start",
    "arguments": {
      "url": "https://example.com"
    }
  }
}

Connect your agent

npx -y @testmaze/mcp init tmt_xxx
claude mcp add tm --scope project -- npx -y @testmaze/mcp

Create the token in your Test Maze workspace under Settings → MCP. Setup for Cursor, Cline, Gemini CLI and Codex CLI is shown there too.