Vitest

A v5 beta series landed with Node.js 22 and Vite 6.4 as minimum requirements, marking a significant step in the framework's evolution.¹

Stricter browser testing defaults arrived in the v5 betas: locators.exact now defaults to true, toHaveTextContent became strict with a new toMatchTextContent alternative for partial matches, and locators shifted to an object representation instead of a string.² The browser mode also gained a trace view for step-level inspection and ARIA tree output on locator errors to aid debugging.³

A cleaner concurrency model replaced the old sequential test and suite options, which were removed in favor of explicit concurrent: false.⁴ The runner also received a fix limiting concurrency per task branch in addition to per leaf callbacks, preventing runaway parallel execution in nested suites.⁵

TypeScript build mode support arrived in beta.3, letting projects that use tsc --build work with Vitest without additional configuration.⁶ The expect package was inlined, removing it as a separate dependency, and loupe.inspect was swapped out for pretty-format for cleaner output.⁷⁸

Security controls for the API server were added across all active release lines: new allowWrite and allowExec options on the api config let teams explicitly gate file-system and exec access, with the browser CDP API respecting those flags too.⁹

The VS Code extension picked up Deno runtime support, a "run related tests" command, an option to enable watch mode on startup, and folder rename/delete/create handling in the test tree watcher.¹⁰¹¹ Coverage preview for Vitest 3 projects and snapshot document symbols with folding support also shipped.¹²¹³