petecoop/pest-plugin-watch

Pest Plugin Watch

A Pest plugin to watch files and restart Pest when they change.

This is a Pest Watch plugin that works with Pest v4 & v5 and differs from the official Pest Watch plugin which became unsupported. It's now built on the spatie/file-system-watcher package which uses the node package chokidar under the hood for efficient file watching.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require petecoop/pest-plugin-watch --dev

In your project, you should have the JavaScript package chokidar installed. You can install it via npm

npm install chokidar --save-dev

If you are using Bun, you can install it via:

bun a -d chokidar

The watcher will automatically use Bun if there is a bun.lock file in your project.

Usage

To start Pest in watch mode, run the following command:

pest --watch

This will restart Pest whenever a file in src, app, tests or resources/views changes.

You can override the default paths by providing your own paths, for example inside your Pest.php file:

Petecoop\PestWatch\Plugin::directories(['src', 'tests', 'custom-dir']);

Code coverage with Laravel Herd

The watcher preserves the PHP binary and configuration that started it. This allows coverage to be collected on every rerun when using Laravel Herd:

herd coverage vendor/bin/pest --coverage --watch

and allows --tia to work with the watcher:

herd coverage vendor/bin/pest --tia --watch