trying to get cursor to use paratest for laravel projects - It worked just great in vscode - all I ahd to do was change the phpunit.phpunit path to point at paratest … this does not work in cursor, only one processor is used.
How do I configure cursor to use paratest over phpunit
Hey, thanks for the request. This isn’t a Cursor-specific thing. The recca0120.vscode-phpunit extension just runs whatever phpunit.phpunit points to, and ParaTest decides how many processes to use. It’s most likely an environment issue. A few things to check:
WSL environment. The most common cause is that in VS Code the project was opened via Remote-WSL, but in Cursor you opened it as a Windows folder. Then php, paratest, and CPU core detection work differently. Open the project in a WSL window wsl+Ubuntu and make sure recca0120.vscode-phpunit is installed and enabled in WSL remote, and that phpunit.php and phpunit.phpunit resolve to WSL binaries, not Windows php.
Set the worker count explicitly. ParaTest defaults can drop to 1 process. Add a flag via phpunit.args, for example:
"phpunit.args": ["-p", "auto"]
or a fixed number like ["--processes=8"].
Running a single test equals 1 process by design. If you click a single test or file, the extension passes --filter, and ParaTest runs it in one process. To see parallel runs, run the whole suite or a folder.
Check that the setting is actually applied. When importing settings from VS Code, workspace settings in .vscode/settings.json don’t always carry over. Make sure the ParaTest override is really in the workspace the way Cursor sees it.
Start with point 1. That’s usually the cause. Let me know if it doesn’t help.
thanks - got it working. turns out even though I was specifying the paratest path in settings json … the vscode setting was still at phpunit in the settings ui … mystery solved.
Glad you figured it out. This is a classic case where the value in the Settings UI overrides what’s in settings.json, so it’s important that both point to paratest.
Thanks for coming back and sharing the diagnosis. It’ll help other user who run into the same thing. I’m marking the thread as solved.