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Drove

Drove is an experimental independent test runner for hierarchical prepared-state execution. It began as a Pest hard fork, but the intended product is a framework with a Pest-compatible frontend—not a permanent downstream branch.

Supported Pest syntax is compiled into Drove's independent Scope IR, executed by the lifecycle kernel, and scheduled through the Rust-backed Drover engine. The Composer package is oxhq/drove; it replaces Pest 5.0.1 only to keep the compatible plugin surface installable during the extraction.

Experimental alpha: v0.4.0-alpha.3 is the technical evaluation release, not a stable compatibility promise. It does not claim external validation. Its schema-2 evidence will gate candidate v0.4.0-alpha.4. Use the live authorities below to verify package availability, native assets, and hosted evidence for an exact release.

The proven compatibility surface includes:

• test(), it(), describe(), and expectations;
• beforeAll, beforeEach, afterEach, and afterAll;
• named and positional datasets;
• custom TestCase instance and static lifecycle plus direct uses() binding;
• one native PHPUnit TestCase class per file, including datasets, groups, class lifecycle, and mixed Pest/PHPUnit suites;
• skips, todos, filters, groups, excluded groups, and test suites;
• fork-local PCOV line coverage for the Pest/PHPUnit bridge;
• explicit per-test deadlines, signal/crash classification, and diagnostic replay metadata;
• an observer-only Drove plugin API and machine-readable compatibility registry;
• a general EnvironmentPlan and resource-capability contract, currently implemented by the three Laravel database providers;
• deterministic test and scope failure/output rendering;
• identical installed-runner output at concurrency 1 and 8.

Install the alpha

Install the tagged packages from Packagist:

The v0.4.0-alpha.3 published-package gate #30597292729 resolved both tagged packages from Packagist on Linux and macOS, x86_64 and ARM64. The native release #30597049719 built, attested, and published the four matching native archives.

The native install does not install or trust Pest, PHPUnit, ParaTest, Collision, Termwind, Symfony Process, or the Pest Composer plugin.

The Pest compatibility bridge is a separate opt-in inside this alpha:

vendor/bin/drove --pest verifies that complete compatible set before loading Pest code. Missing or incompatible dependencies fail explicitly.

drove-install-native is explicit: Composer does not download executable artifacts during install. It selects GNU/Linux (glibc 2.31 or newer) or macOS and x86_64 or aarch64, downloads the matching archive from the exact Drove release tag, verifies its SHA-256 file, and installs the library inside the package. Alpine and other musl-based Linux distributions are unsupported. Set DROVER_LIBRARY=/absolute/path/to/libdrover.so (or .dylib) to use a source-built or separately managed library instead.

The native installer requires PHP's OpenSSL, Phar, and zlib extensions in addition to the runtime FFI, PCNTL, and POSIX extensions declared by the package.

Laravel/Testbench users will also install the matching alpha:

Drove's packaged vendor/bin/pest is a bridge alias, not an independent Pest baseline. Gate-counting comparisons use the v0.4.0-alpha.3 schema-2 collector, which reconstructs the original dependency tree from a recorded revision. alpha.2 evaluator output does not count. See the migration, troubleshooting, and rollback guide.

Run the compatibility gate

Docker is the reproducible path in a tagged source checkout. The Composer archive intentionally excludes these development fixtures:

The installed-project proof runs the real drove executable through Drover, checks path/filter/group/suite selection, and requires exit codes 0, 1, and 2 for passing, failing, and explicitly unsupported input.

See docs/migration-from-pest.md for source installation, the compatibility matrix, and declared limitations. The independent native DSL is the forward product surface; it lowers directly to Scope IR without generated Pest or PHPUnit cases.

Laravel alpha

packages/drove-laravel adds an Artisan subprocess command, one prepared Laravel or Orchestra Testbench application, Laravel-aware file beforeAll, and explicit database state adapters:

• verified file copies for one file-backed SQLite database;
• one inherited in-memory SQLite connection with an explicit prepared-schema contract; and
• rollback isolation for one MySQL connection and InnoDB tables in a disposable test database.

DROVE_LARAVEL_RUNTIME=auto selects a normal application when bootstrap/app.php exists and otherwise defers to Testbench discovery. application and testbench force either mode. A Testbench project that also ships bootstrap/app.php must select testbench explicitly.

The installed proof requires a real testing environment, one bootstrap PID, isolated sibling writes, paired cleanup after failures, and no remaining SQLite artifacts. MySQL migration/truncation traits are rejected before test execution because they can commit schema changes outside the adapter transaction.

The external correctness ladder is Pest, InvoiceShelf, Livewire, then Filament. Each rung is a curated compatibility cohort, not whole-suite adoption proof. The pinned ladder covers all four rungs, ending with Filament's 677-case nonserial cohort at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 30 Drove processes plus its 28-case filesystem-sensitive cohort at 1. The alpha.3 release-SHA full ladder was accepted in External Corpus #30596079973. The stored compatibility benchmark retains requested/observed lanes, counts, milliseconds, and memory sources as a single-sample diagnostic rather than a performance claim. Nucleus is deliberately excluded because its Docker/MySQL suite is not part of this portable corpus. The tagged corpus source records revisions, selections, dependency overlays, and normalization rules.

Bridge coverage, interruption, and replay

drove --pest can merge coverage collected independently in forked Pest/PHPUnit bridge processes. The bridge-gated configuration is PCOV 1.0.12 line coverage with PHPUnit's --coverage-php report. Xdebug and the other PHPUnit report formats remain experimental until they pass the same concurrency and fault matrix. Strict coverage metadata/contribution modes and the ambiguous bare --coverage option remain explicit bridge rejections.

The native Drove frontend does not implement or advertise coverage. Native coverage options are rejected, and the Bridge Coverage gate is not evidence of native-frontend coverage.

--drove-timeout-ms=N assigns one positive default deadline to every selected test; omitting it leaves deadlines disabled. On timeout, SIGINT, or SIGTERM, Drover stops scheduling new work, terminates active process groups, escalates when needed, and reports a stable failure classification. Each task uses one fork: the PHP executor is also its process-group leader, and no inert anchor is created. Drover observes executor exit with waitid(..., WNOWAIT), completes same-group descendant cleanup, and only then reaps the executor. Native runs require the default SIGCHLD disposition so executor children remain waitable. Nested Drove maps register each executor group with the original engine before child readiness. The root cleans that ownership graph transitively if a stateful scope host crashes, including when PHP shutdown handlers cannot run. An explicit DroverScheduler::requestCancellation() is latched and executed at the next safe PHP/native boundary. Native cancellation is fallible: cleanup continues across every active map, then any drain, signal, reap, registry, or permit-release failure is propagated with a stable diagnostic. Destructors and fatal shutdown handlers use the same cleanup path best-effort, report failures to stderr, and never throw from teardown. The configured process count is a hard cap on active test bodies/executor lanes, not on every OS process. Stateful scopes add separately reported, lazily created scope hosts that own their semantic snapshots; inert scopes add none. Aggregate PID and memory telemetry includes both executors and scope hosts.

--replay=path.json writes one no-overwrite diagnostic artifact. --replay-on-failure=path.json writes only for a nonzero run. The artifact contains version/platform data, redacted arguments, a plan hash, status counts, failure kinds, completion order, observed concurrency, sampled PHP memory, and a whitelist-only projection of environment providers and capabilities. It excludes test output, values, environment variables, failure messages, and unknown environment fields, but should still be inspected before sharing. It records the maximum of the root and available descendant PHP-process peaks, not aggregate RSS. It is metadata for reproducing a run; Drove does not yet consume it to rerun the suite.

Plugin and compatibility boundary

vendor/bin/drove --compatibility prints the versioned JSON registry shipped with the package. Drove plugins may implement Drove\Contracts\Plugins\Bootable, InspectsPlan, or ReportsRun. These alpha hooks can observe boot, the immutable plan, and the completed run. They cannot mutate scheduling, results, rendering, or exit policy through the by-value arguments. Observer exceptions fail the run with exit 1 and crash replay metadata; Drove does not silently discard broken telemetry. Pest plugins that depend on runner internals are unsupported unless the registry says otherwise.

Current boundary

This alpha is not a broad Pest/PHPUnit replacement. It uses FFI plus POSIX process semantics. Windows is unsupported. GNU/Linux with glibc 2.31 or newer is the proven platform; musl is unsupported. macOS x86_64/aarch64 remains a beta distribution target. Multiple native PHPUnit classes in one file, test dependencies, process isolation, PHPUnit failOnIncomplete, other unsupported failOn* policies, stopOn*, strict global-state/coverage/output modes, conflicting coverage metadata, PHPUnit extensions, non-default execution order, profiling, alternate printers, multiple Testbench application profiles, Testbench attributes, multiple database connections, Redis/queue/object-storage isolation, and plugins that mutate runner internals are outside the declared alpha surface.

Drove uses exit 1 for any test failure or runtime error and exit 2 for invalid or explicitly unsupported input. It does not preserve PHPUnit's separate runtime-error exit code. Native cleanup covers descendants that remain in the task process group and Drove-owned nested groups in the root ownership registry. User code that deliberately escapes with setsid(), setpgid(), or privilege changes requires an OS sandbox and is outside this alpha.

Packagist, GitHub Releases, and the hosted workflows above are the live publication and proof authorities; a source branch alone is not release evidence.

Attribution

Drove began as a hard fork of Pest. The Pest DSL, expectations, PHPUnit integration, and other upstream-derived code retain their original copyright and the repository's MIT license. src/Drove/Pest contains the modified compatibility frontend, src/Drove/Kernel contains the independent lifecycle kernel, and native/drover contains the original Rust execution engine.