Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

add a hook that runs before ALL test projects / test modules and after all test projects / test modules

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#11,500 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
devtools, testing-qa

Research direction

Start by tracing how dotnet test, dotnet run --project, and server mode discover and execute test projects or modules. Compare where a session-wide lifecycle hook could be introduced across those entry points. Done means defining and validating a design that runs the before and after hooks exactly once for the whole test session, including parallel projects.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area/mtp needs/triage

Summary

currently at the moment some stuff is extremly hard with the M.T.P or even before. and that is running things before all tests projects did run and also after all test projects did run.

the problem is even amplified because its now possible to run tests in multiple ways, there is:

  • dotnet test
  • dotnet run --project TestProj.csproj
  • server mode

probably even more cases i do not now about.

now if you do not have a single csproj that will run as a cordinater you are basically in a game over statement if developers use either one and you want to create a test solution that basically warms stuff up or builds grouped reports at the end.
its also impossible to correctly build solutions to limit parallel execution of tests since, test projects run in parallel and tests inside the projects can also run in parallel. in a big monorepo that gets ugly insanly fast.

things that are also not possible because that feature is missing is test sharding, if a global hook would exists, it might even be possible to provide a way to introduce new args that would allow these features.

also running a single testcontainer, for example a database is basically impossible, running all migrations once before all tests, basically impossible, you basically have no concurrency control at all.

there can be a "hacky" solution for the "start", but not for the finish. the start can be done by creating a file level lock (urgh) the end can be done with a file level lock, if you only need to merge files, but that breaks for stopping containers.

Background and Motivation

we basically want more concurrency control and starting containers and migrations once for the whole test session no matter how many test projects we have.

Proposed Feature

add a way of providing a before all/after all hook, that does run exactly once, but not twice, if you have multiple projects that contain tests. maybe even provide a way to announce possible new arguments, however that would be hard if there are multiple extensions that provide the same arg, so that would need further design work.

the hook should run before anything, maybe for the server mode it can be done when the server mode is launched, its not like test containers would need to be reloaded all the time.

Alternative Designs

provide a solution to stop running test projects in parallel, however that would fix some issues it would mean that we need to pay the bootup multiple times.

Dominant language
C#
Stars
1.1k
Forks
312
Avg merge
9h 13m
Merged PRs (30d)
411

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from microsoft/testfx

All issues in microsoft/testfx

Similar issues

More C# issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.