Browser tests (Dusk)

Laravel Dusk drives a real browser against your application. Two things have to be true for that to work here, and only one of them is the part people expect.

The easy half: a browser in a container

StackVo already knew how to express this. Importing a Sail project recognises its selenium service by name, and a project's stackvo.json has been able to declare its own containers since sidecars existed. So this card declares one:

• the image is selenium/standalone-chromium on Apple Silicon and selenium/standalone-chrome elsewhere. That is not a preference: Google publishes no arm64 build of Chrome, so the chrome image has no arm64 manifest, and a browser running under emulation is a test suite that times out for a reason nobody finds;
• it is tagged, never latest — an untagged image moves under whoever pulled it last month. The tag lives in your stackvo.json, so bumping it is your edit rather than a wait for a StackVo release;
• it gets no host port, because a declared container never does. Nothing outside this project's network needs to reach it, and two clones of one repository would otherwise fight over 4444.

.env.dusk.local is written beside it. Dusk loads that file in place of .env for the length of a run, which makes it the right place for a driver URL that only means anything while the container is up:

APP_URL=https://<your domain>
DUSK_DRIVER_URL=http://stackvo-<project>-chromium:4444/wd/hub

It is never overwritten. A file that replaces your .env for a test run is one whose contents you should have chosen, so if it is already there this card shows you what it would have written and leaves yours alone.

If your project uses an environment other than local, rename the file to match — Dusk looks for .env.dusk.<environment> and loads nothing if the name does not match.

The hard half: the certificate

The browser has to open https://<your domain>. It is inside a container, and that container has never heard of the certificate authority StackVo installed on this machine.

So the test fails on a certificate warning — and a certificate warning inside a browser being driven by a test framework does not look like a certificate warning. It looks like your page did not load, and you go looking in your own code.

The trust button puts the CA in two places, and they are two because they fail separately:

Step	What reads it
The system bundle (update-ca-certificates)	curl, the JVM, anything using OpenSSL
Chromium's NSS database (certutil)	Chromium itself — this is the one that decides whether your test passes

The second needs a tool that is not in every image, so it is reported on its own rather than folded into "trust failed". A step that says certutil: not found is a sentence you can act on.

Both run as root inside that container, because the image runs as seluser and neither location is writable by it. This is docker exec against a container your own project declared, on your own machine.

It has to be run again when the container is recreated. It writes into the container's writable layer; that is how the approach works rather than a fault in it, and it is why the sentence is next to the button instead of in a footnote.

The database

Dusk hits a real database. It is not a transaction that gets rolled back at the end of a test, which is why people who happily run their unit tests locally will not run Dusk.

StackVo's own answer to that is already on this page: a worktree gives a branch its own database, its own hostname and its own environment. This card says so and stops there — a card that moved your test suite onto a different database without being asked would have decided something for you.

What this does not do

It does not run your tests. It makes an environment stackvo artisan dusk can run in.

And it does not touch your DuskTestCase. The driver, the window size and the Chrome flags in it are your code. If Chrome runs out of shared memory in a container — the classic session not created crash — the fix is --disable-dev-shm-usage in that file's Chrome options. StackVo cannot set it for you: a declared sidecar has no shm_size option, and a button that pretended to fix it would be a button that fixed nothing.