The picture shows a beautiful mountain landscape in the morning or evening light. In the foreground, you can see several dark, partly snow-covered ridges, while in the background, gently rolling hills and mountains disappear into the distance on several levels. The scene is shrouded in mist or haze, which enhances the colour gradient from violet to pink to bright yellow and finally blue in the sky. At the bottom right edge, a single person stands on a ridge with a walking stick, giving the image a particularly calm and impressive atmosphere.

This article was originally sent as a newsletter to my subscribers on October 3, 2025. See the end of this article for details.

Flexible data provider reuse

PHPUnit 12.4 introduces a highly requested feature that allows tests to opt out of the validation that ensures data provider methods do not provide more values than a test method accepts. This enhancement, originally requested in issue #6277, addresses real-world scenarios where developers intentionally rely on PHP's ability to accept extra function arguments.

The new functionality enables the reuse of data providers across multiple test methods with different parameter requirements. For example, in security testing scenarios where one test method might check administrator permissions using only an attribute parameter, while another test validates the same attribute along with specific permission profiles.

Better deprecation filtering

A significant improvement comes through pull request #6341, which introduces support for regular expressions with the #[IgnoreDeprecations] attribute. This feature allows developers to selectively ignore specific deprecation warnings instead of suppressing all deprecations, providing much more granular control over test execution.

This enhancement proves particularly valuable when working with third-party libraries that trigger deprecations, enabling teams to focus on their own code quality while gradually addressing dependency-related issues.

Compatibility with PHP 8.5

As PHP 8.5 approaches its scheduled release date of November 20, 2025, I have ensured compatibility for all supported versions, from PHPUnit 8 to PHPUnit 12.

Work on PHP 8.6, which is scheduled for release in November 2026, has already begun. All supported PHPUnit versions are therefore already being tested with the nightly builds of PHP 8.6 in the CI pipeline.

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