What’s New in Pest v4? Master Browser Testing for Laravel with Playwright

Overview

On early morning PDT, the Pest team released version 4, introducing a brand‑new browser testing capability built on Playwright that supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari and lets developers write browser tests just like unit tests, especially for Laravel projects.

Example using Laravel:

it('may reset the password', function () {
    // access any laravel testing helpers...
    Notification::fake();

    // use RefreshDatabase trait, etc.
    $this->actingAs(User::factory()->create());

    $page = visit('/sign-in')
        ->on()->mobile()
        ->inDarkMode();

    $page->assertSee('Sign In')
        ->click('Forgot Password?')
        ->type('email', '[email protected]')
        ->press('Send Reset Link')
        ->assertSee('We have emailed your password reset link!')
        ->assertNoJavascriptErrors();

    Notification::assertSent(ResetPassword::class);
});

Key Features

Laravel integration : supports Event::fake(), assertAuthenticated() and model factories.

Flexibility : test in mobile, tablet, desktop modes and toggle dark/light mode.

Interactivity : full click, type, drag‑and‑drop support.

Performance : parallel execution, screenshot debugging, fast speed.

Installation & Usage

Install the Pest Browser plugin:

composer require pestphp/pest-plugin-browser --dev
npm install playwright@latest
npx playwright install

Use the visit() helper anywhere in your tests.

Run the suite with ./vendor/bin/pest.

Other Major Features

Smoke Tests & Visual Regression

Smoke testing : quickly visit a list of URLs and assert no JavaScript or console errors.

visit(['/', '/about', '/contact'])->assertNoSmoke();

Visual regression : compare screenshots with assertScreenshotsMatches().

visit(['/', '/about', '/contact'])->assertScreenshotsMatches();

Test Sharding & Parallelism

For large projects, Pest v4 adds sharding to run subsets of tests in CI pipelines, e.g.: ./vendor/bin/pest --shard=1/4 --parallel Combine with a matrix strategy to distribute jobs and greatly improve execution speed.

Type Coverage & Profanity Checks

Type coverage runs twice as fast and works with sharding.

Optional profanity plugin ( pestphp/pest-plugin-profanity) adds --profanity flag to enforce professional language.

Environment Skipping & New Assertions

skipLocally()

and skipOnCi() let you conditionally skip tests.

New assertions toBeSlug and not->toHaveSuspiciousCharacters() for string validation.

Pest v4 builds on PHPUnit 12, and the official installation guide (https://pestphp.com/docs/installation) and upgrade guide (https://pestphp.com/docs/upgrade) help both newcomers and experienced users get started quickly.