How to get past error "Unable to acquire remote process agent" when using the NUnit Engine

Question

I'm using the NUnit Engine for NUnit 3 to run unit tests from my application. The method for doing so can be found in the answer to this thread "How to run a NUnit test?". This answer is exactly what I need, except when I attempt to run a test I get the following error:

"Unable to acquire remote process agent"

Stack Trace:
[Exception: Unable to acquire remote process agent]
NUnit.Engine.Runners.ProcessRunner.LoadPackage() +530
NUnit.Engine.Runners.AbstractTestRunner.Load() +22
NUnit.Engine.Runners.MasterTestRunner.LoadPackage() +291
NUnit.Engine.Runners.MasterTestRunner.NUnit.Engine.ITestRunner.Run(ITestEventListener listener, TestFilter filter) +56

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Passing --inprocess option to nunit3-console.exe solved the problem for me.

Answer 2

If you are going to take this approach, you need to make sure that all of the NUnit assemblies and exe's are in your build directory. In your case, I expect that you are referencing the engine so it is getting included, but the nunit-agent.exe and the other files are likely not present.

That said, why not just use nunit3-console to run your tests, or if you need a self-executing test assembly, use the NUnitLite package. With it, you can run tests as simply as,

using NUnit.Common;
using NUnit.Framework;
using NUnitLite;
using System;
using System.Reflection;

namespace MyProject.Test
{
    public class Program
    {
        public int Main(string[] args)
        {
            return new AutoRun(typeof(Program).GetTypeInfo().Assembly)
                .Execute(args, new ExtendedTextWrapper(Console.Out), Console.In);
        }
    }
}