Pester 6.0.0-rc1 is now available
Title: Pester 6.0.0-rc1 is out
First RC of Pester 6 is up and it's feature complete, so I'd love for people to kick the tires before the final release. It runs on Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7.2+, and it's built on the v5 runtime, so Discovery & Run, the config object and the result object all still work the way you know.
The headline is a new set of assertions. The Assert project got merged in and now ships as Should-* commands (dash, no space):
Get-Planet | Should-Be 'Earth'
Instead of everything funneling through Should -Be, these are specialized and type-aware, so the failure messages are clearer and $null, empty collections and single-item arrays stop surprising you. The old Should -Be still works and isn't going anywhere, the new ones are just additive. Mix both, migrate whenever. If you want to go all in, $config.Should.DisableV5 = $true switches the old syntax off so you can't use it by accident.
There's also Should-BeEquivalent for deep, recursive object comparison with a real property-by-property diff. Great for asserting on a whole API response or config object in one shot instead of poking at ten properties.
Other stuff worth knowing:
- Discovery and run now happen per file instead of one big global discovery phase. Mostly invisible if your files are already self-contained, but discovery-time side effects don't leak across files anymore. Each file should import what it needs.
- Experimental parallel runner (
Run.Parallel = $true), one file per runspace on PS7+. Early prototypes went from ~6.5s to ~1.2s. Opt-in, config shape may still change, and it quietly falls back to serial with a warning when it can't parallelize. - Faster code coverage by default — uses the Profiler's tracer instead of breakpointing every command. Added Cobertura output next to JaCoCo.
- PowerShell 5.1 and 7.2+ only. PS 3/4/6 and early 7 are gone, which let us drop a pile of compat code and move the C# to .NET 8.
- Mocking:
Assert-MockCalledandAssert-VerifiableMockare removed (useShould -Invoke/Should-Invoke), and the implicit fall-through to the real command is gone so mocks are more predictable.
Release notes: https://github.com/pester/Pester/releases/tag/6.0.0-rc1
Bugs and feedback very welcome.
