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Vulthil.Extensions.Hosting

Small hosting abstractions for Vulthil. The package currently contains one contract: IRestartableHostedService.

When to use

  • A hosted service (such as a database-polling relay) should be pausable around operations that must not run concurrently with it
  • Test infrastructure needs to stop background work around a reset and resume it afterwards

IRestartableHostedService

A marker interface an IHostedService implements to declare that its execution can be stopped and started again cleanly. Infrastructure can then pause the service for the duration of an operation that must not run concurrently with it, and resume it afterwards.

The primary use is test isolation: Vulthil.xUnit stops every registered hosted service implementing this marker around the per-test database reset and restarts it afterwards, so a live database-polling relay (for example the Vulthil.SharedKernel.Outbox background relay) does not contend with the reset and time it out. The relay opts in simply by implementing the marker — no test-only code, and the testing library never depends on the outbox engine.

internal sealed class OutboxBackgroundService(/* ... */) : IRestartableHostedService, IDisposable
{
    // StartAsync/StopAsync manage the execute task so a Stop/Start cycle re-runs it cleanly.
}

Implementation guidance

Implement the marker only on services whose StartAsync/StopAsync are idempotent across repeated cycles. Prefer implementing IHostedService directly over inheriting BackgroundService: the host observes only the execute task of a BackgroundService's first start and stops the whole host when that task is canceled while the application is running — and on .NET 10 a stop racing service startup can cancel the task before ExecuteAsync has run at all.

See Testing for how the marker participates in the per-test reset.

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