Visual Studio Test Adapter

The NUnit Test Adapter lets you run NUnit tests in Visual Studio, Rider and Visual Studio Code, and from the command line with dotnet test. It runs tests written with NUnit 3, NUnit 4 and NUnit 5.

The adapter is published on NuGet as NUnit3TestAdapter. The name comes from the NUnit 3 era; the same package is used for all current NUnit versions.

• Download released versions
• Download pre-release versions

Getting started

Add the adapter as a NuGet package to each test project. The NUnit project templates in Visual Studio, Rider and dotnet new nunit already include it. See Installation for how to add it to an existing project, and Usage for running and debugging tests in Visual Studio.

Two ways to run tests

The adapter supports both test platforms that dotnet test and the IDEs use:

• VSTest, the classic test platform. This is the default.
• Microsoft.Testing.Platform (MTP), the newer and lighter test platform. From adapter version 6.0, MTP version 2 is supported.

Supported .NET versions

The current adapter, version 6, runs tests on .NET Framework 4.6.2 and later, and on .NET 8 and later. Older .NET versions, such as .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5 to 7, need an older adapter version. See Supported Frameworks for which adapter version supports which .NET version.

Configuration

Use a .runsettings file, or settings on the dotnet test command line, to control how the adapter runs your tests: test filters, output, parallel execution, result files and more. See Configuration with runsettings for all the settings.

Older versions

• The adapter can't run NUnit 2.x tests. Those need the NUnit 2 adapter, which is no longer maintained.
• Up to version 3.17, the adapter was also available as a VSIX extension for Visual Studio 2019 and earlier. The VSIX version is deprecated and doesn't work with Visual Studio 2022 or later. Use the NuGet package instead.