.NET Transactional Document DB and Event Store on PostgreSQL
The Marten library provides .NET developers with the ability to use the proven PostgreSQL database engine and its fantastic JSON support as a fully fledged document database. The Marten team believes that a document database has far reaching benefits for developer productivity over relational databases with or without an ORM tool.
Marten also provides .NET developers with an ACID-compliant event store with user-defined projections against event streams.
## Working with the Code
Before getting started you will need the following in your environment:
### 1. .NET SDK 8.0+
Available [here](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download)
### 2. PostgreSQL 12 or above database
The fastest possible way to develop with Marten is to run PostgreSQL in a Docker container. Assuming that you have Docker running on your local box, type:
`docker-compose up`
or
`dotnet run --framework net6.0 -- init-db`
at the command line to spin up a Postgresql database withThe default Marten test configuration tries to find this database if no
PostgreSQL database connection string is explicitly configured following the steps below:
### Native Partial Updates/Patching
Marten supports native patching since v7.x. you can refer to [patching api](https://martendb.io/documents/partial-updates-patching.html) for more details.
### PLV8
If you'd like to use [PLV8 Patching Api](https://martendb.io/documents/plv8.html#the-patching-api) you need to enable the PLV8 extension inside of PostgreSQL for running JavaScript stored procedures for the nascent projection support.
Note that PLV8 patching will be deprecated in future versions and native patching is the drop in replacement for it. You can easily migrate to native patching, refer [here](https://martendb.io/documents/partial-updates-patching.html#patching-api) for more details.
Ensure the following:
- The login you are using to connect to your database is a member of the `postgres` role
- An environment variable of `marten_testing_database` is set to the connection string for the database you want to use as a testbed. (See the [Npgsql documentation](http://www.npgsql.org/doc/connection-string-parameters.html) for more information about PostgreSQL connection strings ).
_Help with PSQL/PLV8_
- On Windows, see [this link](http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/360-PLV8-binaries-for-PostgreSQL-9.5-windows-both-32-bit-and-64-bit.html) for pre-built binaries of PLV8
- On *nix, check [marten-local-db](https://github.com/eouw0o83hf/marten-local-db) for a Docker based PostgreSQL instance including PLV8.
### Test Config Customization
Some of our tests are run against a particular PostgreSQL version. If you'd like to run different database versions, you can do it by setting `POSTGRES_IMAGE` env variables, for instance:
```bash
POSTGRES_IMAGE=postgres:15.3-alpine docker compose up
```
Tests explorer should be able to detect database version automatically, but if it's not able to do it, you can enforce it by setting `postgresql_version` to a specific one (e.g.)
```shell
postgresql_version=15.3
```
Once you have the codebase and the connection string file, run the [build command](https://github.com/JasperFx/marten#build-commands) or use the dotnet CLI to restore and build the solution.
You are now ready to contribute to Marten.
See more in [Contribution Guidelines](CONTRIBUTING.md).
### Tooling
* Unit Tests rely on [xUnit](http://xunit.github.io/) and [Shouldly](https://github.com/shouldly/shouldly)
* [Bullseye](https://github.com/adamralph/bullseye) is used for build automation.
* [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en/) runs our Mocha specs.
* [Storyteller](http://storyteller.github.io) for some of the data intensive automated tests
### Build Commands
| Description | Windows Commandline | PowerShell | Linux Shell | DotNet CLI |
|-------------------------------------|--------------------------|--------------------------|-------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| Run restore, build and test | `build.cmd` | `build.ps1` | `build.sh` | `dotnet build src\Marten.sln` |
| Run all tests including mocha tests | `build.cmd test` | `build.ps1 test` | `build.sh test` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- test` |
| Run just mocha tests | `build.cmd mocha` | `build.ps1 mocha` | `build.sh mocha` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- mocha` |
| Run StoryTeller tests | `build.cmd storyteller` | `build.ps1 storyteller` | `build.sh storyteller` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- storyteller` |
| Open StoryTeller editor | `build.cmd open_st` | `build.ps1 open_st` | `build.sh open_st` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- open_st` |
| Run docs website locally | `build.cmd docs` | `build.ps1 docs` | `build.sh docs` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- docs` |
| Publish docs | `build.cmd publish-docs` | `build.ps1 publish-docs` | `build.sh publish-docs` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- publish-docs` |
| Run benchmarks | `build.cmd benchmarks` | `build.ps1 benchmarks` | `build.sh benchmarks` | `dotnet run --project build/build.csproj -- benchmarks` |
> Note: You should have a running Postgres instance while running unit tests or StoryTeller tests.
### xUnit.Net Specs
The tests for the main library are now broken into three testing projects:
1. `CoreTests` -- basic services like retries, schema management basics
1. `DocumentDbTests` -- anything specific to the document database features of Marten
1. `EventSourcingTests` -- anything specific to the event sourcing features of Marten
To aid in integration testing, Marten.Testing has a couple reusable base classes that can be use
to make integration testing through Postgresql be more efficient and allow the xUnit.Net tests
to run in parallel for better throughput.
- `IntegrationContext` -- if most of the tests will use an out of the box configuration
(i.e., no fluent interface configuration of any document types), use this base type. Warning though,
this context type will **not** clean out the main `public` database schema between runs,
but will delete any existing data
- `DestructiveIntegrationContext` -- similar to `IntegrationContext`, but will wipe out any and all
Postgresql schema objects in the `public` schema between tests. Use this sparingly please.
- `OneOffConfigurationsContext` -- if a test suite will need to frequently re-configure
the `DocumentStore`, this context is appropriate. You do *not* need to decorate any of these
test classes with the `[Collection]` attribute. This fixture will use an isolated schema using the name of the
test fixture type as the schema name
- `BugIntegrationContext` -- the test harnesses for bugs tend to require custom `DocumentStore`
configuration, and this context is a specialization of `OneOffConfigurationsContext` for
the *bugs* schema.
- `StoreFixture` and `StoreContext` are helpful if a series of tests use the same custom
`DocumentStore` configuration. You'd need to write a subclass of `StoreFixture`, then use
`StoreContext` as the base class to share the `DocumentStore` between
test runs with xUnit.Net's shared context (`IClassFixture`)
### Mocha Specs
Refer to the build commands section to look up the commands to run Mocha tests. There is also `npm run tdd` to run the mocha specifications
in a watched mode with growl turned on.
> Note: remember to run `npm install`
### Storyteller Specs
Refer to build commands section to look up the commands to open the StoryTeller editor or run the StoryTeller specs.
### Current Build Matrix
| CI | .NET | Postgres | plv8 | Serializer |
|-----------------|:----:|:---------:|:------------------:|:----------:|
| GitHub Actions | 8 | 12.8 | :white_check_mark: | STJ |
| GitHub Actions | 8 | 15-alpine | :x: | Newtonsoft |
| GitHub Actions | 7 | 12.8 | :white_check_mark: | JSON.NET |
| GitHub Actions | 7 | latest | :x: | STJ |
| Azure Pipelines | 6 | 12.8 | :white_check_mark: | JSON.NET |
| Azure Pipelines | 6 | 12.8 | :white_check_mark: | STJ |
| Azure Pipelines | 6 | 15-alpine | :x: | STJ |
| Azure Pipelines | 6 | latest | :x: | Newtonsoft |
## Documentation
All the documentation is written in Markdown and the docs are published as a static site hosted in Netlify. v4.x and v3.x use different documentation tools hence are detailed below in separate sub-sections.
### v4.x and above
[VitePress](https://vitepress.vuejs.org/) is used as documentation tool. Along with this, [MarkdownSnippets](https://github.com/SimonCropp/MarkdownSnippets) is used for adding code snippets to docs from source code and [Algolia DocSearch](https://docsearch.algolia.com/) is used for searching the docs via the search box.
The documentation content is the Markdown files in the `/docs` directory directly under the project root. To run the docs locally use `npm run docs` with auto-refresh on any changes.
To add code samples/snippets from the tests in docs, follow the steps below:
Use C# named regions to mark a code block as described in the sample below
```csharp
#region sample_my_snippet
// code sample/snippet
// ...
#endregion
```
All code snippet identifier starts with `sample_` as a convention to clearly identify that the region block corresponds to a sample code/snippet used in docs. Recommend to use snake case for the identifiers with words in lower case.
Use the below to include the code snippet in a docs page
