Note that if you are trying to use xUnit and its IClassFixture<T>
pattern, you will run into problems if you just use the InternalsVisibleTo approach. Specifically, you'll get something like this:

"Inconsistent accessibility: base class WebApplicationFactory<Program>
is less accessible than class CustomWebApplicationFactory
."
Of course you can solve this by making CustomWebApplicationFactory
internal but it only moves the problem as now your unit test class will give the same error. When you try to change it there, you will find that xUnit requires that tests have a public constructor (not an internal one) and you'll be blocked.
The solution that avoids all of this and allows you to still use IClassFixture<Program>
is to make the Program
class public. You can obviously do this by getting rid of the magic no class version of Program.cs, but if you don't want to completely change that file you can just add this line:
public partial class Program { } // so you can reference it from tests
Of course once it's public you can use it from your test project and everything works.
As an aside, the reason why you typically want to prefer using IClassFixture is that it allows you to set up your WebApplicationFactory just once in the test class constructor, and grab an HttpClient
instance from it that you can store as a field. This allows all of your tests to be shorter since they only need to reference the client instance, not the factory.
Example:
public class HomePage_Get : IClassFixture<CustomWebApplicationFactory>
{
private readonly HttpClient _client = new HttpClient();
public HomePage_Get(CustomWebApplicationFactory factory)
{
_client = factory.CreateClient();
}
[Fact]
public async Task IncludesWelcome()
{
HttpResponseMessage response = await _client.GetAsync("/");
response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
string stringResponse = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
Assert.Contains("Welcome.", stringResponse);
}
}
Finally note that Damian Edwards' MinimalAPIPlayground was updated to use this approach after we discussed the issue. See this commit