In his talk, Nuno Maduro announced Pest v3, with several new features and no breaking changes.

I know this is pretty exciting to a lot of people, but personally I prefer PHPUnit for several reasons:

• Better IDE support
  • e.g., in a Pest test, $this->assertDatabaseHas(…) runs without errors, but the IDE thinks it’s invalid because the test file doesn’t extend the base TestCase or inherit any of the parent methods
  • I personally like the discoverability of using a class, as my IDE will suggest available methods.
  • I do think there are some Pest helpers that I haven’t fully used, so those might help alleviate these gripes.
  • Yes, I know that Pest can be used as the test runner, and still use PHPUnit-style classes.
• Improved VS Code test integration
  • This is the best VS Code extension I’ve found to work with tests in a PHP project. It shows all the tests along with pass/fail results in the sidebar, and I use the keyboard shortcut to run tests all the time.
  • The extension only works with PHPUnit tests, not Pest.
  • However, the upcoming first-party Laravel VS Code extension might change that…

These new features did catch my eye though:

• Architecture presets: ensure your code follows best practices and conventions; read more here and see the plugin here
• Mutation testing: let Pest modify parts of your code to ensure it causes failing tests, to ensure your tests are covering what you think they are; see the plugin here

I’ll be taking a look to see if I can use some of the underlying packages with PHPUnit.

All in all, seems like a solid upgrade, but it just doesn’t excite me all that much.