CI/CD with GitHub Actions pipeline to run the .Net unit test and publish results

 Writing Tests (Unit Tests, Integration Tests) is not only the best practice but also essential to ensure quality code.

From the DevOps side, it is essential to put a gate to check for successful unit test execution with each pull request or push. So in this article, we will see how to implement a pipeline to run the unit tests and publish the results.

What do we need?

1. We need a pipeline to be triggered with every pull request for your code repo.
2. Jobs to run the unit tests and publish the results.

Please follow my other articles to learn more about GitHub Actions: CI/CD with GitHub Actions, CI/CD with GitHub Actions to deploy Applications to Azure App Service, CI/CD with GitHub Actions to deploy Application to Azure Kubernetes Cluster

Let’s create our pipeline for unit test execution. To do this add a yaml/yml file as .github/workflows/buildAndRunTest.yml in the root project folder and then starts with defining the name & triggering action.

name: Build and run tests

env:
  DOTNET_VERSION: '6.0'     # set this to the .NET Core version to use
  WORKING_DIRECTORY: './src' #define the root folder path
  
on:
  workflow_dispatch:    #for manual trigger
  pull_request:  #trigger action with pull request
    branches:
      - main   #your branch name

Next step, we will define the job and mention the target machine (Linux/windows) then perform the necessary steps for code checkout and setting .net core

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest #target machine is ubuntu
    
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    
    - name: Setup .NET Core
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      with:
        dotnet-version: ${{ env.DOTNET_VERSION }} #reading it from env variable defined above

I’m using “EnricoMi/publish-unit-test-result-action” action from the marketplace with JUnit logger hence we need to install the related package for each test project as the next step.

Xml logger for JUnit v5 compliant xml report when test is running with “dotnet test” or “dotnet vstest”.

- name: Setup test loggers
      shell: pwsh
      run: |
        foreach ($file in Get-ChildItem -Path .src/tests/*Tests.csproj -Recurse)
        {
          dotnet add $file package JunitXml.TestLogger --source 'https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json'
        }

From the above code, looping through all test projects inside the src/tests folder.

Next step we will execute the tests with dotnet command.

- name: Run unit tests
      shell: bash
      working-directory: ./src
      run: |
        dotnet test myDemoApp.sln --logger 'junit;LogFileName=TestResults.xml' \
          --verbosity normal --results-directory ./_test-results

The above code will run all the unit tests in the project and save the result inside the src/_test-results/TestResults.xml file.

If you have categorized tests then you can use the filter option with dotnet test as:
dotnet test — filter “TestCategory=CategoryA”

Finally will publish the results using “EnricoMi/publish-unit-test-result-action” from the marketplace.

 - name: Publish Unit Test Results
      uses: EnricoMi/publish-unit-test-result-action@v2
      if: always()
      with:
        junit_files:  ./src/_test-results/*.xml

We are done so With this if you the actions pipeline you will see the results as:

Note: There are various actions available in the GitHub marketplace to publish your test results, please explore them too.

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