“Your session has expired” when testing with user in Laravel Spark

[Posted this in the Spark channel too.]

In Spark on Laravel 5.5, I have this test:

$this->be(factory('App\User')->create());
$thing= factory('App\Thing')->create();
$response = $this->get('/things');
$response->assertSee($thing->title);

When I run it with PHPUnit it fails, and among the HTML output is:

<div class="modal-body">
    Your session has expired. Please login again to continue.
</div>

The route it is hitting has no middleware - instead the middleware's in the controller:

public function __construct()
{
    $this->middleware('auth');
}

But I get the same error when I remove this function.

Other things I've tried:

• Using WithoutMiddleware
• Using MySQL instead of sqlite-in-memory as test db
• Adding trial_ends_at field to User factory
• Adding <env name="CASHIER_ENV" value="testing"/> to phpunit.xml, so that it matches the Spark tests config
• Testing with a clean install of Laravel/Spark. Same error.