README

A complete browser-testing toolkit for WordPress + Bedrock + Acorn projects: FrankenPHP-backed Pest browser tests, plus Playwright and Unlighthouse wired up with one command.

Replaces the test driver that wraps wp-cli's single-threaded wp server with a FrankenPHP (Caddy + libphp) subprocess. Required for any flow that fans out into concurrent requests — the canonical case is the WooCommerce Blocks Store API checkout, but anything with overlapping AJAX / redirects / fragment loads hits the same limitation.

What you get

Bambamboole\AcornTesting\Testing\FeatureTestCase — Pest base case that boots WordPress + Acorn + Eloquent once per process and re-imports a seeded baseline dump before each test.
Bambamboole\AcornTesting\Testing\BrowserTestCase — extends the feature base; spawns FrankenPHP and wires it into pest-plugin-browser.
Bambamboole\AcornTesting\Testing\FrankenPhpDriver — the actual pest-plugin-browser HttpServer implementation. Auto-downloads the binary on first use if missing.
wp acorn testing:setup — one-shot provisioning: downloads FrankenPHP, updates .gitignore, installs Playwright + Unlighthouse + Puppeteer as npm dev-deps, runs playwright install chromium, publishes unlighthouse.config.js. Idempotent — safe to re-run.
unlighthouse.config.js stub — pragmatic per-category Lighthouse budgets (Performance 80, Accessibility 95, Best Practices 90, SEO 95) and a 20-route crawl cap.
.ai/ assets — a Boost-discoverable guideline + skill that tell wp acorn boost:update about the package's testing conventions.

Requirements

PHP 8.4+
WordPress 6.x with Bedrock layout (public/ web root)
Acorn 6.1+
Pest 4+
Node.js 22+ (for Playwright / Unlighthouse)

Install

composer require --dev bambamboole/acorn-testing
wp acorn testing:setup
wp acorn vendor:publish --tag=acorn-testing-config

testing:setup provisions everything needed to run browser + Lighthouse tests:

Downloads the pinned FrankenPHP binary into ./frankenphp.
Appends /frankenphp and .unlighthouse/ to .gitignore (if missing).
Adds playwright, puppeteer, and unlighthouse-ci to package.json dev-deps (if missing).
Runs npx playwright install chromium so headless Chrome is on disk.
Publishes unlighthouse.config.js to the project root (if not present).

Then bind your Pest suites in tests/Pest.php:

uses(Bambamboole\AcornTesting\Testing\FeatureTestCase::class)->in('Feature');
uses(Bambamboole\AcornTesting\Testing\BrowserTestCase::class)->in('Browser');

And fill in project values in the published config/acorn-testing.php — typically seeders, wp_title, admin_email:

return [
    'seeders' => [Database\Seeders\WordPressBaselineSeeder::class],
    'wp_title' => 'My Project Tests',
    'admin_email' => 'admin@myproject.test',
];

That's it. composer test:browser (or however your project runs Pest) will spawn FrankenPHP, drive your tests, and tear it down.

Running the Lighthouse audit

Wire up a single browser test that shells out to Unlighthouse — for example tests/Browser/LighthouseTest.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use Illuminate\Process\Factory;

it('passes Lighthouse budgets for all crawled URLs', function (): void {
    update_option('blog_public', 1);
    update_option('blogdescription', 'My project tagline.');

    visit('/');

    $result = new Factory()
        ->path(dirname(__DIR__, 2))
        ->env(['NODE_OPTIONS' => '--use-system-ca'])
        ->timeout(600)
        ->run(
            ['npx', 'unlighthouse-ci', '--site', 'http://127.0.0.1:8080'],
            fn (string $type, string $buffer) => fwrite($type === 'err' ? STDERR : STDOUT, $buffer),
        );

    expect($result->successful())->toBeTrue('Unlighthouse exited non-zero — a URL fell below budget.');
})->group('lighthouse');

Tag it lighthouse and exclude it from the regular suite so iteration stays fast:

"test:browser": "pest --testsuite=browser --exclude-group=lighthouse",
"lighthouse": "pest tests/Browser/LighthouseTest.php"

composer lighthouse runs only the audit (~60s). Adjust budgets in unlighthouse.config.js.

Auditing a deployed environment (staging / production)

The Pest test above audits the FrankenPHP-served test site — useful for catching regressions on every PR. To audit a deployed site (staging, production, preview build), skip the test entirely and invoke unlighthouse-ci directly with the deployed URL:

# One-off (uses the local unlighthouse.config.js budgets)
npx unlighthouse-ci --site https://staging.example.com

# Or via env var so the config file's `process.env.UNLIGHTHOUSE_SITE` picks it up
UNLIGHTHOUSE_SITE=https://staging.example.com npx unlighthouse-ci

Wire it as a composer/npm script if you do this often:

"lighthouse:staging": "UNLIGHTHOUSE_SITE=https://staging.example.com npx unlighthouse-ci",
"lighthouse:production": "UNLIGHTHOUSE_SITE=https://example.com npx unlighthouse-ci"

Practical notes for non-local audits:

Basic auth (common on staging): npx unlighthouse-ci --site https://staging.example.com --auth user:pass.
Cookies / headers (logged-in audits, feature flags): --cookies "key=value;key2=value2" and --extra-headers "X-Feature=on,X-Other=bar".
Sitemap fast-path: if your site exposes one, --sitemaps /sitemap.xml skips link-crawl and audits exactly what's listed.
CI against staging on every deploy: same pattern, just point at the staging URL in your post-deploy workflow. No FrankenPHP, no test DB — Unlighthouse only needs network access to the deployed URL.
Budgets are shared: the same unlighthouse.config.js ci.budget block applies to whichever site you point at. A regression on staging fails the same way a regression on the local audit does.

CI integration

Cache the binary across runs. Example for GitHub Actions:

- name: FrankenPHP cache
  uses: actions/cache@v4
  with:
    path: frankenphp
    key: frankenphp-${{ runner.os }}-v1.11.2

No extra install step is needed in CI — the driver auto-downloads the binary on the first browser test if the cache missed. For the Lighthouse audit, also cache ~/.cache/ms-playwright.

Configuration reference

config/acorn-testing.php keys (all optional):

Key	Default	Description
`frankenphp_binary`	`<project>/frankenphp`	Path to the binary. Override via `FRANKENPHP_BINARY` env var if needed.
`webroot`	`'public'`	Bedrock document root, passed to `frankenphp php-server --root`.
`seeders`	`[]`	Seeder FQCNs run when building `testing.sql`.
`wp_title`	`'Test Site'`	Passed to `wp core install --title`.
`admin_email`	`'admin@test.test'`	Passed to `wp core install --admin_email`.
`plugins`	`'all'`	`'all'`, an array of slugs, or `[]` to skip plugin activation.
`dump_path`	`<project>/database/dumps/testing.sql`	Where the seeded baseline dump is stored.
`playwright_timeout_ms`	`90_000`	Playwright per-action timeout.

Why FrankenPHP?

wp server wraps PHP's built-in php -S dev server, which is single-threaded. It serves one request at a time. WC Blocks checkout (and similar flows) make overlapping calls in close succession — POST to /wp-json/wc/store/v1/checkout, redirect to order-received, fragment AJAX — and the second request blocks the first. Locally on a fast CPU it usually races through; on a slow CI runner it deadlocks.

FrankenPHP runs Caddy with libphp embedded, multithreaded by default. The same test that's flaky on wp server runs reliably on FrankenPHP, including in CI.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.

bambamboole / acorn-testing

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