Integration Test Postgres using docker-compose and GitHub Actions

This is a continuation of an earlier post Integration Testing Postgres Store. In this tutorial I will show you how I setup GitHub Actions to run integration tests using the docker-compose.dev-env.yml file.

There is another post Integration Test Postgres using GitHub Actions that uses GitHub Actions service containers to setup postgres before running integration tests.

Workflow

Name and filters

I started off by naming the workflow and defining which branches and paths to run it for.

name: Integration Test Postgres (docker-compose)

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
     - 'postgres-store-integration-test/**'

build job

Next step is to define job, we only have a single job for this workflow that is named build. We will be running it on ubuntu-latest and we will set the default directory to where sample project is located, we would not need to set the default directory if the repo contains a single solution.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: postgres-store-integration-test

Steps

Next is to define the steps. I have started with the standard steps defined in Building and testing .NET guide. We checkout code, setup dotnet SDK, restore packages and build the solution in release mode.

An additional step is to setup the serivces our integration tests would be dependent on using the docker-compose and docker-compose.dev-env.yml file, which already contains the development dependencies required. I have taken the liberty to use the same docker-compose file we used during development, however a good practice is to create a separate file e.g. docker-compose.ci.yml to keep dependencies needed during CI (continuous integration) separate to what is required during development.

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v3
  - name: Start container and apply migrations
    run: docker compose -f "docker-compose.dev-env.yml" up -d --build
  - name: Setup .NET Core SDK
    uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v3
    with:
      dotnet-version: 7.0.x
  - name: Install dependencies
    run: dotnet restore
  - name: Build
    run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore

Run integration tests

Next step is to execute integration tests. This is done with following step

steps:
  ...
  - name: Run integration tests
    run: dotnet test --configuration Release --no-restore --no-build --verbosity normal

Please note we have the connection string hardcoded in DatabaseFixture, code can be updated to be read that from environment variable to make it configurable.

Cleanup containers

Final step is to run docker compose command to shutdown running containers and cleanup images and volumes used by those containers.

steps:
  ...
  - name: Stop containers
    run: docker compose -f "docker-compose.dev-env.yml" down --remove-orphans --rmi all --volumes

Complete Workflow

Here is the complete workflow, also available at GitHub.

name: Integration Test Postgres (docker-compose)

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
     - 'postgres-store-integration-test/**'

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: postgres-store-integration-test

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Start container and apply migrations
        run: docker compose -f "docker-compose.dev-env.yml" up -d --build
      - name: Setup .NET Core SDK
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v3
        with:
          dotnet-version: 7.0.x
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: dotnet restore
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore        
      - name: Run integration tests
        run: dotnet test --configuration Release --no-restore --no-build --verbosity normal
      - name: Stop containers
        run: docker compose -f "docker-compose.dev-env.yml" down --remove-orphans --rmi all --volumes

Source

Source code for the demo application is hosted on GitHub in blog-code-samples repository, source for this workflow is in integration-test-postgres-docker-compose.yml.

References

In no particular order

• REST API with ASP.NET Core 7 and Postgres
• Postgres Database
• Integration Testing
• Docker
• GitHub Actions
• Building and testing .NET
• About service containers
• And many more