In Laravel 10, I want to use PEST with token auth on api testing

Slowly going crazy…

I want to use PEST for laravel API testing – I’m suspecting this is bad.

Tests work fine, until I hit routes that need token auth. This seems impossible using PEST as it keeps getting 404 errors.

Here is my current attempt:

use AppModelsChemical;
use IlluminateFoundationTestingRefreshDatabase;
use AppModelsUser;

uses(RefreshDatabase::class);

test('it retrieves a list of chemicals', function (){
    $chemical = Chemical::factory()->create();

    $user = User::factory()->create();
    $token = $user->createToken('api-token')->plainTextToken;

    $this->getJson('/v1/chemicals', ['Authorization' => 'Bearer ' . $token])
        ->assertStatus(200)
        ->assertJson([
            'data' => [
                [
                    'id' => $chemical->id,
                    'name' => $chemical->name,
                    'extra' => $chemical->extra,
                    'cas_number' => $chemical->cas_number,
                ]
            ]
        ]);
});

This fails with:

ChemicalControllerTest > it retrieves a list of chemicals                    
  Expected response status code [200] but received 404.
Failed asserting that 200 is identical to 404.

using dd – I see that a valid token does get generated – but it seems to barf.. Weirdly it seems to nuke all seeded users as well..

This curl works fine

curl --request GET 
  --url http://laravel-api.test/api/v1/chemicals 
  --header 'Accept: application/json' 
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer 1|laravel_sanctum_HbPJpzXxpxU2EUqS9wkflt0h9OUPlaMoWQWUYtKseedfe14f'

What am I getting wrong? Or should I manually login to get a token and then save it into my code?

I did originally want to have some kind of global function to carry a token so that I didn’t have to write boilerplate to create tokens…