SMARTY DISCLAIMER: Subject to the terms of the associated license agreement, this software is freely available for your use. This software is FREE, AS IN PUPPIES, and is a gift. Enjoy your new responsibility. This means that while we may consider enhancement requests, we may or may not choose to entertain requests at our sole and absolute discretion.
gunit
Installation
$ go get github.com/smartystreets/gunit
We now present gunit
, yet another testing tool for Go.
Not again... (GoConvey was crazy enough...but sort of cool, ok I'll pay attention...)
No wait, this tool has some very interesting properties. It's a mix of good things provided by the built-in testing package, the assertions you know and love from the GoConvey project, the xUnit testing style (the first real unit testing framework), and it's all glued together with go test
.
Blah, blah, yeah, yeah. Ok, so what's wrong with just using the standard "testing" package? What's better about this gunit
thing?
The convention established by the "testing" package and the go test
tool only allows for local function scope:
func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
// blah blah blah
}
This limited scope makes extracting functions or structs inconvenient as state will have to be passed to such extractions or state returned from them. It can get messy to keep a test nice and short. Here's the basic idea of what the test author using gunit
would implement in a *_test.go
file:
package examples
import (
"time"
"testing"
"github.com/smartystreets/assertions/should"
"github.com/smartystreets/gunit"
)
func TestExampleFixture(t *testing.T) {
gunit.Run(new(ExampleFixture), t)
}
type ExampleFixture struct {
*gunit.Fixture
}
func (this *ExampleFixture) SetupStuff() {
}
func (this *ExampleFixture) TeardownStuff() {
}
func (this *ExampleFixture) TestWithAssertions() {
this.So(42, should.Equal, 42)
this.So("Hello, World!", should.ContainSubstring, "World")
}
func (this *ExampleFixture) SkipTestWithNothing() {
}
func (this *ExampleFixture) LongTestSlowOperation() {
time.Sleep(time.Hour)
this.So(true, should.BeTrue)
}
So, I see just one traditional test function and it's only one line long. What's the deal with that?
Astute observations. gunit
allows the test author to use a struct as the scope for a group of related test cases, in the style of xUnit fixtures. This makes extraction of setup/teardown behavior (as well as invoking the system under test) much simpler because all state for the test can be declared as fields on a struct which embeds the Fixture
type from the gunit
package. All you have to do is create a Test function and pass a new instance of your fixture struct to gunit's Run function along with the *testing.T and it will run all defined Test methods along with the Setup and Teardown method.
Enjoy.
Parallelism
By default all fixtures are run in parallel as they should be independent, but if you for some reason have fixtures which need to be run sequentially, you can change the Run()
method to RunSequential()
, e.g. in the above example
func TestExampleFixture(t *testing.T) {
gunit.RunSequential(new(ExampleFixture), t)
}
Advanced Examples
For users of JetBrains IDEs, here's LiveTemplate you can use for generating the scaffolding for a new fixture:
- Abbreviation:
fixture
- Description:
Generate gunit Fixture boilerplate
- Template Text:
func Test$NAME$(t *testing.T) {
gunit.Run(new($NAME$), t)
}
type $NAME$ struct {
*gunit.Fixture
}
func (this *$NAME$) Setup() {
}
func (this *$NAME$) Test$END$() {
}
Be sure to specify that this LiveTemplate is applicable in Go files.