Testify VS gotest.tools

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.

Assertion libraries that people seem to love: - testify (my favorite) - go-cmp is a more barebones library - gotest.tools -- I have never used this but some swear by it

I've written a bit about both of these approaches in the gotest.tools wiki.