xUnit & TeamCity

Having used nUnit for some time and Visual Team System's test architecture i was recently interested in putting this to work on my own project as part of an automated build & test architecture. The test architecture of Visual Team system isn't particualy suited to Continuous Integration as you need to reference assemblies that only seem to be part of Visual Studio and you're not allowed to distribute these. I considered nUnit as this is what i am used to but as it's my own projected decided to give xUnit a shot as it seems to be the next logical step in good testing practices.

I had started using ThoughtWords CI server but after banging my head on the table a few times in my failed attempts to integrate xUnit, and on the advice of Brad Wilson, decided to look at TeamCity.

With some help from Brad I managed to get this working but as it was still a little tricky (i only rarely change this infrastruture of this kind of thing once it it set up) i decided to document how to do it. Note that you can't just point TeamCity at the .sln file in this case because you need to TELL it that it must run your xUnit tests and clearly the .sln file doesn't know about them. So what you need to do is create an MSBuild file where you can tell TeamCity to (a) build your solution file AND (b) run your tests via xUnit.

1. Download and Insteall team city. Configure this to get it building your base code ( i won't document this as there are loads of places to find out more).

2. Go to the folder where your .sln file sites and create a file called "mysolution.msbuild" (or something similar).

3. Enter the following Xml:

<project defaulttargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<usingtask assemblyfile="[RelativePathToXUnit]xunit.runner.msbuild.dll" taskname="Xunit.Runner.MSBuild.xunit">

<target name="Build">
<msbuild projects="mysolution.sln" targets="Build" properties="Configuration=Debug">
<xunit assembly="[RelativePathToProject]bin\Debug\MyProjectTests.dll">
</xunit></msbuild></target>

</usingtask></project>


* Remember to replace [RelativePathToXUnit] with the relative path from your solution file to where the xunit runner assembly can be found. Also make sure [RelativePathToProject] is changed to point to the project where your tests can be found.

4. Now via the TeamCity GUI in the "Build Runner" tab of your project, select MSBuild and add the relative path to your "mysolution.msbuild" file relative to your checkout directory (in my case it is often "/mysolution.msbuild").

5. Now you can run your build and you'll find all your unit tests are run.