I recently saw that Laravel Dusk was being sunsetted :) and the modern way to test laravel (and any websites) was with Pest 4. It uses Playwright under the hood, and this video by Nuno Maduro at Laracon US 2025 really shows its power.

To install in an existing laravel 12 repository, i ran these commands to remove the old phpunit, install pest and upgrade and initialise the pest testing framework.

composer remove phpunit/phpunit
composer require pestphp/pest --dev --with-all-dependencies
./vendor/bin/pest --init 
composer upgrade # i needed to update the packages
./vendor/bin/pest # run the tests

the output of the first run was thus:

   PASS  Tests\Unit\ExampleTest
  ✓ that true is true

   PASS  Tests\Feature\ExampleTest
  ✓ the application returns a successful response                                                                                                                                                                                       0.11s

  Tests:    2 passed (2 assertions)
  Duration: 0.16s

now to install the browser test bits

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

If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon