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Pest Plugin: Only Failed / Rerun Failed

Adds two independent CLI flags to Pest v4:

• --only-failed — skip straight to running only the tests that failed on the previous run, instead of the full suite.
• --rerun-failed — run the full suite as normal, and if anything failed, automatically rerun just those failed tests afterward, in the same invocation, under a distinct "Rerun of failed tests" section — so you can see at a glance whether a failure was consistent or flaky.

No phpunit.xml changes are required in consuming projects.

Install

Composer's plugin allow-list may prompt you to trust pestphp/pest-plugin (the mechanism Pest itself uses to discover plugins from composer.json's extra.pest.plugins); this package is registered the same way.

Usage

Every run (with or without either flag) overwrites .pest-only-failed.json in the project root with the current run's failures — a plain overwrite, not a merge, so a test that's since been fixed drops off the list automatically. Add this file to your .gitignore.

The flake-exit-code decision

If --rerun-failed reruns a test and it passes, the overall run still exits non-zero. The initial failure counts. The rerun section is purely informational — it tells you whether a failure was consistent (fails again) or possibly flaky (passes on rerun), but it does not launder the exit code. This is a deliberate strict default: CI should not go green just because a test happened to pass on a second attempt.

--parallel support

Both flags work under --parallel. Each paratest worker is a separate process with its own partial view of the results — only the fraction of tests it happened to run — so this plugin does nothing in worker processes and defers entirely to the coordinator process. The coordinator never runs any tests itself (it just dispatches work to workers and waits), so instead of PHPUnit's normal per-process result facade, it reads Pest\Plugins\Parallel\Paratest\WrapperRunner::$result — the object Pest's own parallel runner populates by merging every worker's serialized result once they've all finished. That merged result is what gets written to .pest-only-failed.json and what --rerun-failed reruns.

The rerun itself always runs serially, even after a --parallel main pass — a rerun set is normally a handful of tests, not enough to be worth re-parallelizing, and it avoids recursing through the whole worker/coordinator split a second time.

--only-failed's read side needs no special handling at all: it pushes a --filter argument before Pest hands off to paratest, so paratest just distributes the already-narrowed test list across workers as normal.

Known upgrade risks

This plugin relies on internal PHPUnit/Pest details that are not covered by either project's backward-compatibility promise:

• PHPUnit\TestRunner\TestResult\Facade::result() — PHPUnit's own internal accessor for the current run's results, marked @internal. A future PHPUnit release could change or remove it.
• Pest overrides PHPUnit's --filter matching (see vendor/pestphp/pest/overrides/Runner/Filter/NameFilterIterator.php) to match functional test()/it() cases against their printable name (the original description string, via Pest\Contracts\HasPrintableTestCaseName) rather than the internal, mangled method name PHPUnit's event system reports. This plugin builds its failure ids the same way Pest's override does, so --filter round-trips correctly — but that override is itself @internal to Pest and could change in a future release. Classic class-based (extends TestCase) tests aren't affected by this distinction.
• Pest\Plugins\Parallel::isWorker()/isEnabled() and Pest\Plugins\Parallel\Paratest\WrapperRunner::$result — all @internal to Pest, and specific to Pest's current paratest integration. If Pest changes how it merges parallel results, --parallel support here could silently start reading a stale or empty result again.

If either of these break, both flags will most likely fail to select the right tests (or select none) rather than fail silently — bug reports welcome.

How it works

• --only-failed reads .pest-only-failed.json and, if it has entries, pushes a --filter argument onto the CLI arguments before PHPUnit boots (via Pest\Contracts\Plugins\HandlesArguments).
• After the run finishes (via Pest\Contracts\Plugins\Terminable), the plugin reads the final result, writes the current failure list, and — if --rerun-failed was passed and something failed — spawns a fresh subprocess (php vendor/bin/pest --filter=... --colors=...) scoped to just those tests. A second in-process PHPUnit run isn't attempted: PHPUnit\TextUI\Application::run() seals the event subscriber system with no corresponding unseal, so a second in-process run risks colliding with already-sealed state from the first pass.