What’s New in Bedrock v1.29.0?
Ben Word
Bedrock v1.29.0 bumps the PHP minimum requirement to 8.3 and adds first-class testing support with Pest.
PHP 8.3 minimum
Bedrock now requires PHP 8.3+. PHP 8.1 reached end of life in December 2025, and setting 8.2 as the floor would have given less than a year before another bump. PHP 8.3 receives security support through December 2027, giving this change a longer useful window.
This aligns Bedrock with the rest of the Roots ecosystem — Trellis defaults to 8.3, Radicle requires 8.4, and the upcoming Laravel v13 which Acorn will adopt will have an 8.3 requirement.
Testing with Pest
Bedrock now ships with a Pest testing scaffold out of the box. Run composer test and you’re off:
$ composer test
PASS Tests\Feature\ExampleTest
✓ example
Tests: 1 passed (1 assertions)
Duration: 0.02sThe setup is intentionally minimal — phpunit.xml.dist, a tests/Pest.php bootstrap, and an example test. It’s a PHP testing baseline, not a WordPress integration test harness. Extend it with your preferred tooling as needed.
This closes a long-standing request that’s been open since 2018. See the testing documentation for more details.