Provide a Way to Validate Templates

It’s very easy to build and deploy a broken template. In particular, you might add complicated symbols that cause the project to fail to build when the user selects certain options. One way to help solve this is to validate the template. The validator would

1. Validate the template.json file.
2. Create the template with the default symbols, build it, maybe run it using the ASP.NET Core TestHost API to ensure it works.
3. Foreach symbol, provide a non-default value, then build it, maybe run it using the ASP.NET Core TestHost API.

I’m currently planning to do the above using xUnit tests. However, you might know a better way using the templating internals and Roslyn perhaps?

[RehanSaeed]

I’ve written some code to run tests against a template that lets you do this:

[Fact]
public async Task Home_BuildsAndRuns_Returns200Ok()
{
    // Find the location of the template project in the current solution.
    var projectDirectoryPath = TemplateAssert.GetProjectDirectoryPath(
        this.GetType().GetTypeInfo().Assembly,
        "ApiTemplate.csproj");
    TemplateAssert.DotnetNewInstall(projectDirectoryPath).Wait();

    using (var project = await TemplateAssert.DotnetNew("bapi", "HomeTest"))
    {
        await TemplateAssert.DotnetRestore(project.DirectoryPath);
        await TemplateAssert.DotnetBuild(project.DirectoryPath);
        await TemplateAssert.DotnetPublish(project.DirectoryPath, "netcoreapp1.1");
        await TemplateAssert.NpmInstall(project.DirectoryPath);
        await TemplateAssert.Gulp(project.DirectoryPath, "build");
        await TemplateAssert.DotnetRun(
            project.DirectoryPath,
            async testServer =>
            {
                var response = await testServer.CreateClient().GetAsync("/");
                Assert.Equal(HttpStatusCode.OK, response.StatusCode);
            });
    }
}

Right now it all works but with one issue remaining. DotnetRun dynamically loads the published assemblies and attempts to bootstrap the Startup class using the ASP.NET Core TestHost. Unfortunately, loading Swashbuckle.AspNetCore causes a TypeLoadException. It seems to have trouble with third party libraries. I’d really appreciate any help as I’m at a loss.

[RehanSaeed]

@mlorbetske My framework is still work in progress. I managed to get it working (including starting up an ASP.NET Core site using the TestHost API and executing some requests) but I had to restore, build and pubslish it as a standalone app, so it includes all the DLL’s in one folder.

I currently have issue https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/21982 open in the corefx repository to see if I can do the above using a normal non-standalone publish. Once I’ve sorted this issue, I’ll release my code as a NuGet package for all to play use and profit from.