Alba v5.0 is out! Easy recipes for integration testing ASP.Net web services

Alba is a small library to facilitate easier integration testing of web services built on the ASP.Net Core platform. It’s more or less a wrapper around the ASP.Net TestServer, but does a lot to make testing much easier than writing low level code against TestServer. You would use Alba from within xUnit.Net or NUnit testing projects.

I outlined a proposal for Alba V5 a couple weeks back, and today I was able to publish the new Nuget. The big changes are:

• The Alba documentation website was rebuilt with Vitepress and refreshed to reflect V5 changes
• The old SystemUnderTest type was renamed AlbaHost to make the terminology more inline with ASP.Net Core
• The Json serialization is done through the configured input and output formatters within your ASP.Net Core application — meaning that Alba works just fine regardless of whether your application uses Newtonsoft.Json or System.Text.Json for its Json serialization.
• There is a new extension model that was added specifically to support testing web services that are authenticated with JWT bearer tokens.

For security, you can opt into:

1. Stub out all of the authentication and use hard-coded claims
2. Add a valid JWT to every request with user-defined claims
3. Let Alba deal with live OIDC integration by handling the JWT integration with your OIDC identity server