Mailwal, Testing Akka.NET Actors with the Akka.TestKit
Unit and Integration Testing Akka.NET Actors
Hello Mailwal - we thought you might like this!
Using the Akka.TestKit
All Akka.NET actors are asynchronous, which makes testing them a little unconvential compared to run-of-the-mill F# or C# code.
Thus in this email we introduce the Akka.TestKit module - a library that makes it easy to unit test Akka.NET actors using all of the popular .NET unit testing frameworks - xUnit, NUnit, and VsTest.
- Blog Post: "How to Unit Test Akka.NET Actors with Akka.TestKit" (2015) - it's a little old and doesn't cover some of the new `Task`-based APIs for the TestKit, but otherwise it's still completely accurate with respect to how the TestKit works and the tools it gives you to make testing actors a breeze.
- Video: "How to Test Akka.NET Applications Pt 1: How to Make Actors Easily Testable" (2024) - part of a recent webinar we did on Akka.NET testing, Aaron Stannard, one of the creators of Akka.NET walks through:
- How to design actors so they can be easily testable;
- Akka.NET testing best practices; and
- How to avoid designing "racy" unit tests.
- Video: "How to Test Akka.NET Applications Pt 2: Writing Akka.NET Unit & Integration Tests with Akka.TestKit" (2024) - second half of the webinar we showed, this video addresses more of the TestKit APIs and how to work with them. It covers:
- How to use the Akka.TestKit packages to test actor behavior;
- How to test Akka.Persistence for persistence / recovery failures; and
- Using Akka.Hosting.TestKit for integration testing actors with other services like ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework.
We hope you find these helpful - please don't forget to join the Akka.NET Discord if you have questions!
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