gomock VS dockertest

The commit mentions this rather sad thread: https://github.com/golang/mock/pull/627#issuecomment-1605169...

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

Normally I like to generate everything with Mockgen and test it using table driven test.

Looking at gomock's commit history, it seems like there hasn't been much activity on the project in a couple of years. I'm wondering if this is the case of software being mostly done and just in maintenance mode, or if gomock is falling behind. The reason I fear for the latter is there are still issues being opened up that don't seem to be engaged very much.

Yeah, that would work just fine. Nevertheless, as your business logic gets more complicated, you will want to test more scenarios and mocks will get complicated fast. In these cases tools like gomock really shine and make your life easier. I understand that this is a just-for-fun project, but it's never too early to experiment with a popular solution, especially if you plan on using Go professionally in the future.

Unit tests are leveraged to test individual units of code. As such it is not recommended for a developer to scaffold entire dependencies for the sake of testing a single object. Due to the way Go's specific implementations work, I've learned over time to declare interfaces for a lot of the structs that I use in Go. Interfaces not only define a contract for which struct-based implementations should adhere, but they also provide a mechanism for which struct methods can be mocked. While I've experimented with the mock package in testify, I've come to prefer the mock functionality which is provided by mockgen.

gomock can also be great for testing when used sparingly. Mocking out one or two calls is great, anymore than that and it becomes exponentially harder to reason about

Where we do use mocks, we primarily use GoMock.

I am using https://github.com/ory/dockertest for tests, specifically for databases. Is there any advantage to use Testcontainers?

Now, let's run the tests. For this purpose, we are going to use dockertest, but test containers is also a good solution.

During my path learning go so far I have come across some amazing libraries and utilites, one of my favourite for integration testing is dockertest.

Things I can't live without in a new Go project in no particular order:

- https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint - meta-linter

- https://goreleaser.com - automate release workflows

- https://magefile.org - build tool that can version your tools

- https://github.com/ory/dockertest/v3 - run containers for e2e testing

- https://github.com/ecordell/optgen - generate functional options

- https://golang.org/x/tools/cmd/stringer - generate String()

- https://mvdan.cc/gofumpt - stricter gofmt

- https://github.com/stretchr/testify - test assertion library

- https://github.com/rs/zerolog - logging

- https://github.com/spf13/cobra - CLI framework

FWIW, I just lifted all the tools we use for https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

We've also written some custom linters that might be useful for other folks: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/tree/main/tools/analyzers

I've used dockertest a bunch and it is really amazing.

Reminds me of https://github.com/ory/dockertest

If your project is relatively simple and you can get away with recreating your scenarios against a real mock database and run other related services locally. It would be good to setup docker containers for your test scripts and write e2e tests. I believe e2e tests are harder but more useful in understanding/reasoning how users are impacted.

Just a heads up, the repository in your comment is invalid, the correct link is https://github.com/ory/dockertest

Don't mock. Use https://github.com/ory/dockertest to actually run tests against a dockerized DB.

Use a library like ory/dockertest to spin up a test database for integration tests. It's easy to use, and tests are still fast. It'll take a minute to download the mysql docker image the first time. But, once it's been downloaded, starting the db, running migrations, and running the tests is still pretty quick.