Orchestration

Managing complex test infrastructure—like databases, message brokers, and external APIs—is a common challenge in integration testing. Prova provides several tools to help orchestrate these dependencies.

Lifecycle Hooks

Use lifecycle hooks to manage the setup and teardown of shared infrastructure.

• [BeforeAll] / [AfterAll]: Perfect for global infrastructure that should persist across all tests in a class or assembly.
• [BeforeEach] / [AfterEach]: Use these for state that must be reset for every single test.

public class DatabaseTests : IAsyncLifetime
{
    private MyDb _db;

    public async Task InitializeAsync()
    {
        _db = await Container.StartSqlAsync();
    }

    public async Task DisposeAsync()
    {
        await _db.StopAsync();
    }
}

Service Discovery

Prova integrates tightly with dependency injection, allowing you to easily resolve services needed for your tests.

• [ClassFactory]: Use a custom factory to instantiate your test classes with complex dependencies.
• [ClassDataSource]: Inject data directly into your test class constructors from DI.

Integration Tools

Prova ecosystem includes first-class support for industry-standard orchestration tools.

• Testcontainers: Use the Prova.Testcontainers package to spin up transient Docker containers for databases and other services.
• .NET Aspire: Leverage the Aspire.Hosting.Testing library to test multi-service applications as a single unit.
• Playwright: Orchestrate browser instances for full end-to-end UI testing.

Test Isolation

To prevent flaky tests, ensure that each test run is isolated:

1. Prefer Transient State: Use unique database schemas or ports for each test run where possible.
2. Clean Teardown: Always use IAsyncLifetime or [AfterAll] to shut down resources, even if a test fails.
3. Handle Timeouts: Use the [Timeout] attribute to ensure a hung orchestration step doesn't block your entire CI pipeline.