Integration Test Postgres using testcontainers-net and GitHub Actions

This is a continuation of an earlier post Integration Test Postgres with testcontainers-dotnet. In this tutorial I will show you how I setup GitHub Actions to run integration tests.

There is another post Integration Test Postgres using GitHub Actions that uses GitHub Actions service containers to setup postgres and run migrations as a step before running integration tests.

Also another post Integration Test Postgres using docker-compose and GitHub Actions uses docker-compose to setup Postgre database server and run migrations using docker-compose.dev-env.yml file we already have for development before running integration tests.

The difference here is we don’t need to have a separate step to setup Postgres database server and run migrations as this is baked into our integration tests using testcontainers-dotnet.

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 (testcontainers-dotnet)

on:
  push:
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
     - 'integration-test-postgres-with-testcontainers-dotnet/**'

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: integration-test-postgres-with-testcontainers-dotnet

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.

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v3
  - 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 and final 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. Also we don’t need to worry about cleaning up containers that would be handled by the DatabaseFixture tear down step.

Complete Workflow

Here is the complete workflow, also available at GitHub.

name: Integration Test Postgres (testcontainers-dotnet)

on:
  push:
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
     - 'integration-test-postgres-with-testcontainers-dotnet/**'
    
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: integration-test-postgres-with-testcontainers-dotnet

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - 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

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-testcontainers-dotnet.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
• testcontainers-dotnet
• And many more