Developing the Framework

This page follows the common workflow for the NUnit framework. The repros are in nunit.issues.

Building and testing

The repository has one solution, nunit.slnx, and a Cake build script: build.cmd (Windows), build.ps1 (PowerShell) or build.sh (Linux and macOS). They take the same arguments:

Command	What it does
build	Restores and builds everything (default target).
build --target=Rebuild	Cleans the output and builds everything.
build --target=Test	Runs all tests, on all target frameworks.
build --target=Package	Creates the packages in package\. It does not build first.
build --showdescription	Lists all targets.

The configuration is Release by default; use --configuration=Debug to change it. The tests to run are in the nunit.framework.tests-*, nunit.framework.legacy.tests-* and nunitlite.tests-* projects. The other test projects contain tests that fail on purpose, for the integration tests. BUILDING.md in the repository has the details.

Fixing a bug

1. Make the repro in nunit.issues: a folder Issue<number> with a readme.md that links to the issue, and a project that builds and runs. Link the folder from the issue.
2. Add a failing test to the framework's test projects that shows the bug, then fix the code. Run build --target=Test: the framework targets several frameworks, and a fix can behave differently on each.
3. Run build and build --target=Package, and copy the NUnit package from package\ to your local feed.
4. Update the repro to that package, see Testing an unreleased package, and check that the bug is gone. The repro runs through the NUnit3 VS Adapter, so a bug that only shows in Visual Studio can be checked there too, see Checking Test Explorer with te-dump.