GoTest

Package gotest provides rich assertions for use within and beyond Go's testing package.

GoTest plays well with "vernacular" Go testing tests, providing a rich set of assertions to test HTTP Responses, JSON and JSON:API data, general equality, numeric comparison, collections, strings, panics, types, and time.

Look at these GoDocs for the latest documentation.

Quickstart

Grab the package and import it:

go get github.com/kindrid/gotest import "github.com/kindrid/gotest" import "github.com/kindrid/gotest/should"

Code normal testing-style tests, but use gotest.Assert and assertions found in should like this:

gotest.Assert(t, actualJson, should.HaveFields, "name", reflect.String, "children", reflect.Map, "hobbies", reflect.Slice)

Assertions are just functions that accept interfaces and return a non-empty string if there's an error. Look at gotest.should.Assertion for the details. Look at should/doc.go and should/assertion.go ofr more details.

Overview

GoTest plays well with "vernacular" Go testing tests, providing a rich set of assertions to test HTTP Responses, JSON and JSON:API data, general equality, numeric comparison, collections, strings, panics, types, and time.

Most of these rich assertions are provided by SmartyStreet's excellent assertion library (https://github.com/smartystreets/assertions) which builds off Aaron Jacobs' Oglematchers (https://github.com/jacobsa/oglematchers).

In addition, any SmartyTreets-style assertion can be used as is (see https://github.com/smartystreets/goconvey/wiki/Custom-Assertions).

Why

We like Go's stdlib testing because it's simple, fast, familiar to most Go coders, has good tooling support, benchmark support, and coverage support.

In earlier versions of Go, we missed subtests for test organization and a more BDD approach. We looked at GinkGo (github.com/onsi/ginkgo) and GoConvey (github.com/smartystreets/goconvey/convey)--both with benefits--and chose GoConvey because of the simple and consistent approach it took to writing custom assertions. See the documenataion for "gotest/should" for more details on that. It also had a pretty test runner.

But around the release of Go 1.7 we ran into some problems: the growth of parameterized (table-driven) tests in our code didn't play well with GoConvey. GoConvey's approach to building test suites made it hard to focus specific subtests.

We also ran into an opportunity: testing now supported subtests. See https://godoc.org/testing#hdr-Subtests_and_Sub_benchmarks. We were able to drop a lot of fancy suite construction code and gain easier focussing on particular tests. But we had come to appreciate GoConvey's excellent assertion pattern. We considered moving to github.com/stretchr/testify and used it's pattern for the custom assertion wrapper (see Assert below). It also had a simple custom-assertion pattern, but GoConvey's seemed simpler and more useful. We took a sideways glance at GUnit (github.com/smartystreets/gunit) and Labix's GoCheck (gopkg.in/check.v1 ). Very cool packages, but we wanted to stay closer to testing with its new versatility.