godog VS Testify

Quick side note - this is probably the subject of a whole other blog post but my current favourite way of testing CLI tools uses godog to write tests. It can be a little complex but I've found it supremely powerful. Here are some good examples of how I've approached it with layli and wait-for.

It's complaining about a file missing in $GOPATH/pkg... but I'm not sure how do I get the packages its asking for. Things I have tried: - running go mod tidy - running go get -u github.com/cucumber/godog (hoping it would add the files to pkg/mod/... - Uninstalled and installed Go again.

I also use BDD (Gherkin with godog in particular) to verify and document the expected behaviour of a product from an end user's perspective when needed. I usually do this when the product also contains untested code that I have no control over when I'm working on a problem - this gives me peace of mind over something I can't control while doubling as documentation.

It looks like it is not possible to share steps between scenario's or features. In https://github.com/cucumber/godog it is possible to share steps.

Differences between gherkingen and godog are:

I prefer to use the Go library testify, which significantly simplifies the code:

nil is returned initially, as we're creating user_test.go and using Testify to create tests as we shape the behavior of PostUser. We don't have a DB wired up yet, so the responses will simply be hard-coded structs of what we expect the API to respond with for now to pass the tests.

Bonus: Testify

Testify: Popular framework with assertion functions and mock objects.

Testing: unit and integration tests using Testify and formatted test output using gotestsum

We’ve integrated the excellent testify library with its “assert” functionality to allow for smoother test implementation:

This article is too basic and does not introduce anything you'd encounter in a typical Go project. If you want introduction to Go testing I recommend just reading the official docs https://pkg.go.dev/testing and understanding how to write table driven tests - https://go.dev/wiki/TableDrivenTests.

Going beyond what's built in, get familiar with https://github.com/stretchr/testify as that's used a lot.

Of course, as soon as people saw this, the third-party assertion helper libraries started appearing. The most popular one seems to be testify (although I've never used it). Personally, I thought that the explicit check would be good enough for me, but it's true that after writing a bunch of tests, the boilerplate does seem unnecessarily verbose.

github.com/stretchr/testify

I then verify that there are no issues with writing the body with require.NoError() from the testify toolkit. This will ensure the test fails if something happens to go wrong at this point.