testcontainers-go VS venom

Let's first look at the original version of the test, in this case, an end-to-end, using testcontainers.

It supports multiple languages (including Go!) and databases (also messaging infrastructure etc.) - All you need is Docker. Testcontainers for Go makes it simple to programmatically create and clean up container-based dependencies for automated integration/smoke tests. You can define test dependencies as code, run tests and delete the containers once done.

Testcontainers Go Documentation

Some of the features: - ✅ Using Vertical Slice Architecture as a high level architecture - ✅ Using Event Driven Architecture on top of RabbitMQ Message Broker with a custom [Event Bus](pkg/messaging/bus/) - ✅ Using Event Sourcing in Audit Based services like [Orders Service](services/orders/) - ✅ Using CQRS Pattern and Mediator Patternon top of Go-MediatR library - ✅ Using Dependency Injection and Inversion of Controlon top of uber-go/fx library - ✅ Using RESTFul api with Echo framework and using swagger with swaggo/swag library - ✅ Using Postgres and EventStoreDB to write databases with fully supports transactions(ACID) - ✅ Using MongoDB and Elastic Search for read databases (NOSQL) - ✅ Using OpenTelemetry for collection Distributed Tracing with using Jaeger and Zipkin - ✅ Using OpenTelemetry for collection Metrics with using Prometheus and Grafana - ✅ Using Unit Test for testing small units with mocking dependent classes and using Mockery for mocking dependencies - ✅ Using End2End Test and Integration Test for testing features with all of their real dependeinces using docker containers (cleanup tests) and testcontainers-go library

For example, you could take a look at this open-source project that helps you spawn docker containers as part of your test setup enabling you to execute queries to a local database.

Using something like TestContainers to spin up a DB for testing has been my best experience. Any mocks leave too much room for error imo

I highly recommend testcontainers for this.

The next block in .gitlab-ci.yml is the services block. Since our tests use testcontainers package and we're pushing a docker container onto Dockerhub, we will need to specify a services block next. Services will enable our pipeline to leverage Docker-in-Docker DinD.

You can also load fixtures in database directly, work with Kafka queues both as a producer (e.g. write an event to a Kafka queue, wait a few seconds and see that it was consumed by the service you test, and that some side effects can be observed) or as a consumer (e.g. make sure after an HTTP call, an event was correctly pushed to a queue), or even read a mailbox in IMAP to check that your service correctly send an email.

It's a bit rough on the edges sometimes, but I'd never go back on writing integration tests directly in my programming language. Declarative is the way to go.

[1]: https://github.com/ovh/venom

To write and run our integration tests, we'll use Venom. Venom is a tool created and made open-source by OVHcloud: https://github.com/ovh/venom

From my experience, generated tests are worthless for anything more serious than smoke tests. I prefer working with no tests than automated tests, I feel they give you a false sense of confidence.

The Step CI engine itself looks good though. It looks like a cleaner, but less powerful version of a tool (open source, build in-house) we used when I worked at OVHcloud, Venom: https://github.com/ovh/venom

Here's an example test file for the HTTP executor of Venom: https://github.com/ovh/venom/blob/master/tests/http.yml it's very close to Step CI format.

I'd still use Venom because it's way more powerful (you have DB executors for example, so after executing a POST request you can actually check in DB that you have what you expect) and I prefer focusing on actually writing integration tests instead of generating them.

Maybe this post sounds harsh (I feel it as I write it because I have strong feelings against test generation) but I think your approach is a good one for actually writing automated tests. Testing APIs declaratively like this has a great benefit: your tests work on an interface. You can migrate your API to a whole new stack and your tests remain the same. I did it multiple time at OVHcloud: one time migrating a huge API from a Go router to another (Gin->Echo), and another time migrating public APIs from a legacy, in-house Perl engine to a Go server.

I still struggle with GDB but my excuse is that I seldom use it.

When I was studying reverse engineering though, I came across a really cool kit (which I've yet to find an alternative for lldb, which would be nice given: rust)

I'd recommend checking it out, if for no other reason than it makes a lot of things really obvious (like watching what value lives in which register).

https://github.com/hugsy/gef

LLDB's closest alternative to this is called Venom, but it's not the same at all. https://github.com/ovh/venom

We incorporated [Venom](https://github.com/ovh/venom) into our workflow. It's great for initiating and managing a suite of yaml based tests. It didn't work out of the box for us due to the heavily asynchronous nature of our system, but after a few additions, it has helped my team greatly. We were often afraid to make large changes to critical pieces of the system since a full regression test could take a week or so to check everything. Now it takes an hour.