This blog is about running a Dotnet Core test project with the Postgres database in the backend in the GitLab CICD pipeline. In GitLab-CICD, we will create a Postgres instance, which will be used by Integration Tests written in Dotnet Core. We will also obtain AWS secrets from the secret manager and submit them for testing concurrently.
In one of my projects, I wanted to test how my application code stores data in the database using production configurations. This was not big application where we would have a separate test server or would have component testing against live database. We just wanted to make sure the application’s configurations were stored properly in AWS secret manager, and using these secrets, app runs properly against the Postgres database in the backend.
I tried it using docker-compose with docker:dind(Docker-In-Docker) but was facing a connection issue to the database host to be used in the application connection string. Then I tried everything in GitLab-ci.yml, which looks like good practice as well.
.Gitlab-ci.yml file snapshot:
Copy .Gitlab-ci.yml content from github: https://github.com/dattatrayr/run-dotnet-tests-with-postgres-database-gitlab-cicd/blob/main/.gitlab-ci.yml
Connection configurations will look like below in your application,
Host: postgres
User: $POSTGRES_USER
Password: $POSTGRES_PASSWORD
Database: $POSTGRES_DB