Why to create Hilt Container Activity for Instrumentation Tests

2 min readFeb 13, 2023

Lets see in 2 minutes, why Hilt activity for instrumentation tests is required and how to create it.

Hilt makes testing easier, You do not need to always create a separate activity for test unless its really required.

Possible scenarios for test activity

There are different situations where you want to create a separate activity for test e.g the following reasons but not limited to these.

You want to test a Composable But your App Activity might have other Composables that you don’t want to create or test e.g you have bottom or drawer layout as parent container in Activity but you want to test a specific Composable
Usually, for testing a Fragment, you first launch an Activity as container of a Fragment. so if the Fragment has annotation @AndroidEntryPoint, the container Activity must also be annotated with @AndroidEntryPoint. If you just use ActivityScenario, this doesn’t happen automatically. That’s why you need to create an activity container
Your Composable is depending upon a ViewModel and ViewModel is annotated with a @HiltViewModel and in your test you want to get viewModel via hiltViewModel() Api resolve dependencies.

Lets go step by step

Create debug folder at app/main/src
Create folder named kotlin in that debug folder
Create package named as your app package name e.g com.name1.name2
Now Create activity inside that folder HiltTestActivity and annotate it with @AndroidEntryPoint

You need to add this activity into Android Manifest with exported=false For that you need to add following dependency

debugImplementation "androidx.compose.ui:ui-test-manifest:$compose_version"

AndroidManifest.xml file will looks like this

Project structure will look like this

First have to create test rule using HiltTestActivity and then set activity content to your Composable that you want to test.

Now setup the Test as below.

Now you can use composeTestRule to perform test on your Composable

That's it!

You can download the project from here