How to Effectively Differentiate Unit and Integration Tests in Go?

Differentiating Unit Tests from Integration Tests in Go

In Go, separating unit tests from integration tests is crucial for streamlining your testing process and ensuring efficient execution.

Established Best Practices

While there's no explicitly defined best practice in GoLang's testify framework, several effective techniques exist:

1. Utilizing Build Tags

As recommended in SoundCloud's Go practices, leveraging build tags (described in the "Build Constraints" section of the build package) allows you to selectively run specific tests based on tags:

// +build integration

var fooAddr = flag.String(...)

func TestToo(t *testing.T) {
    f, err := foo.Connect(*fooAddr)
    // ...
}

By calling go test -tags=integration, you can execute only the tests designated with the integration build tag. Alternatively, you can set the default by using // build !unit and disable them by running go test -tags=unit.

2. Implementing Test Metadata

Using the testing.T type's Metadata() function, you can add metadata to your tests. For example, you could define a Tag key with the value "integration" to mark tests as integration tests:

import (
    "testing"
)

func TestIntegration(t *testing.T) {
    t.Metadata("Tag", "integration")
    // ...
}

You can then filter tests based on this metadata using go test -run integration.

3. Defining Custom Flags

You can create custom flags in main, as you suggested:

var runIntegrationTests = flag.Bool("integration", false
    , "Run the integration tests (in addition to the unit tests)")

and use an if-statement at the start of each integration test:

if !*runIntegrationTests {
    this.T().Skip("To run this test, use: go test -integration")
}

While this approach is straightforward, it requires manual maintenance of the flag and adding the if-statement to each integration test.

By utilizing build tags or test metadata, you can automate the process of separating your unit and integration tests, simplifying your testing workflow.

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