petecoop/pest-plugin-watch

A Pest plugin to watch your files and re-run tests on changes.

0.1.0 2025-11-10 19:51 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.3
• pestphp/pest: ^4.0.0
• pestphp/pest-plugin: ^4.0.0
• spatie/file-system-watcher: ^1.2

MIT

• Pete Cooper

• plugin
• watch
• pest
• test watcher

README

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

This is a Pest Watch plugin that works with Pest v4 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 or tests 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']);