I've used this little bash alias for many years to quickly run the tests inside of a project.

alias p="vendor/bin/phpunit"

With this alias in place, I can run the tests by typing "p" on the CLI. Nice!

For a long time, everything was great! But then, Pest appeared on the scene. It's an alternative test runner for PHP with a high focus on developer experience.

If you want to know more about Pest, check out the official documentation or the video course that I made on it.

To execute Pest, I introduced another bash alias.

alias pest="vendor/bin/pest"

But having separate commands for PHPUnit and Pest is a bit cumbersome. I often switch projects, and with two testing commands, I have to think if I should use p or pest to run the tests.

Because I didn't want to think about this (and because my muscle memory always let me type "p"), I've now replaced these two aliases with a single Bash function.

function p() {
    if [ -f vendor/bin/pest ]; then
       vendor/bin/pest "$@"
    else
       vendor/bin/phpunit "$@"
    fi
 }

With this function, I can type "p" in the terminal to run the tests of the project where I'm currently on. The function will pick the right test runner for me. Sweet!

Because I often use the --filter flag to run a single test, I've also added this pf function.

function pf() {
    if [ -f vendor/bin/pest ]; then
       vendor/bin/pest --filter "$@"
    else
       vendor/bin/phpunit --filter "$@"
    fi
 }

Both the p and pf functions can be found in my dotfiles repository. You'll find all settings that I use on the CLI in that repository. If you want to use the same settings as me, look at the readme in the repo to learn how to use them.