2 min read

Pest 5 Is Announced at Laracon US 2026

Technical Content Writer

2 min read

Nuno Maduro opened Laracon US 2026 with Pest 5 - the biggest release in the framework's history - and shipped it before the day was over. We were in the room in Boston as a Silver sponsor of the conference.

We are at Laracon US 2026 in Boston, and as usual, the event is full of updates and enhancements across the Laravel ecosystem. The one that stood out on day one was Pest 5, introduced by Nuno Maduro in the opening talk.

We’ve been a sponsor of Pest since 2024. We use Pest on essentially everything we build - 20 to 25 Laravel projects running in parallel across a team of 100+ engineers. So watching it go from an elegant syntax layer over PHPUnit to what Nuno presented on stage - a testing engine that AI coding agents can drive, and that can test AI agents back - was a good thing to see up close.

What is new in Pest 5?

Built on PHP 8.4 and PHPUnit 13, the release is - in Nuno's framing during the Q&A:

“about 50% agents, 50% humans.“

He walked through six features.

Tia Engine. The headline. Test Impact Analysis records which tests depend on which files, then re-runs only the tests your change actually affected and replays cached results for the rest. Nuno demoed the Laravel Cloud suite dropping from 200 seconds to 5 - and replays report identical coverage, because each cached test stores the exact lines it covered.

The Agent plugin. Gives an AI coding agent a single command to verify a change inside your real test suite. On stage, "is the login form working?" resolved into one call that created a user, drove a real browser through the form, and asserted the backend state. Browser-only agent tools can confirm the UI looks right; they cannot confirm the mail was sent or the row was written.

Evals. A first-party plugin for testing LLM agents through the same expect() API - LLM-as-judge, semantic similarity, factual accuracy, prompt-injection resistance, and tool-call trajectory. Evals are skipped by default and only run under --evals, so a normal test run stays fast and free.

First-party PHPStan plugin. One of the most requested community features. PHPStan has never understood Pest's functional API and buried tests in false positives. Nuno's demo went from 50+ errors to two - both real bugs.

Automated refactoring with Rector. Sixty rules that convert raw PHP assertions into Pest's matchers. His framing was pointed: AI writes correct expectations, but not idiomatic Pest ones. This cleans up after it.

Time-balanced sharding. Pest 4 split CI suites by file count, so whichever shard collected the browser tests ran long and everyone waited on it. Pest 5 splits by actual execution time instead. Laravel Cloud now lands at roughly 2 minutes per shard.

Also in the release: new expectations including toBeEmail(), toBeUlid() and toBeIpAddress(), plus a full rebrand and rebuilt documentation site.

The evals part, from our side

We know that problem well. Building PP Mobius, where AI agents run FCA-regulated compliance reviews and every check has to show its evidence to a human reviewer, we hit exactly the gap Nuno described on stage: change a system prompt or swap a model, and there is no reliable way to know what you broke. So we built pest-plugin-evals ourselves to run evals against Laravel AI SDK agents.

Seeing the same problem solved in Pest core, with a far richer scorer API than ours, is the best possible outcome - and a reasonable signal that we were reading the ecosystem correctly.

Pest 5 requires PHP 8.4 or greater, and for most suites upgrading is a one-line change:

-    "pestphp/pest": "^4.0",
+    "pestphp/pest": "^5.0",

It shipped the same day it was announced. We are already upgrading.

Full release notes are on pestphp.com.

Updated on Jul 31, 2026 by

First published on Jul 31, 2026

Trending News

Jun

Hosting the First Official Laravel Meetup in Georgia

We hosted the first official Laravel Meetup in Georgia, bringing together more than 100 attendees for an evening dedicated to Laravel, engineering, and community.

Jun

Hosting a RDBR Meetup on Our Tavistock Protect Partnership

At our latest RDBR Meetup, we looked inside our two-year partnership with Tavistock Protect and the product we have been building together: PP Mobius.

Keti Getiashvili

Technical Content Writer at Redberry

Translates Engineering Work into Client-Facing Content

Keti leads editorial content at Redberry, writing and producing the company's technical articles, case studies and client interview series. Her work helps translate our team's first-hand engineering experience into helpful content for a global audience.