A few weeks ago I wrote an article about writing unit tests for Golang. In this article I’m going to explore using testify to make writing tests easier.
Installation
I’m not going to cover how to install the testify library in this article. I wrote an article in the past explaining how to use dep for dependency management, you should follow that process to use testify.
Assertions
The assert package is the easiest to use. It provides functions that make it easy to verify that a variable has the expected value. The documentation lists all the assertions available, so I won’t cover them all. Instead, I’m going to show examples of uses of the ones that I use more often.
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package main
import (
"testing"
"github.com/stretchr/testify/assert"
)
func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
// All these assertions pass
assert.Equal(t, "hello", "hello", "Values are equal")
assert.NotEqual(t, "hello", "world", "Values are different")
assert.Contains(t, "hello", "el", "String contains other given string")
assert.True(t, true, "Value is true")
assert.False(t, false, "Value is false")
// All these assertions fail
assert.Equal(t, "hello", "world", "Values are equal")
assert.NotEqual(t, "hello", "hello", "Values are different")
assert.Contains(t, "hello", "y", "String contains other given string")
assert.True(t, false, "Value is true")
assert.False(t, true, "Value is false")
}
The error messages for the failures are descriptive enough that it is easy to understand why the assertion failed:
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--- FAIL: TestSomething (0.00s)
main_test.go:17:
Error Trace: main_test.go:17
Error: Not equal:
expected: "hello"
actual : "world"
Diff:
--- Expected
+++ Actual
@@ -1 +1 @@
-hello
+world
Test: TestSomething
Messages: Values are equal
main_test.go:18:
Error Trace: main_test.go:18
Error: Should not be: "hello"
Test: TestSomething
Messages: Values are different
main_test.go:19:
Error Trace: main_test.go:19
Error: "hello" does not contain "y"
Test: TestSomething
Messages: String contains other given string
main_test.go:20:
Error Trace: main_test.go:20
Error: Should be true
Test: TestSomething
Messages: Value is true
main_test.go:21:
Error Trace: main_test.go:21
Error: Should be false
Test: TestSomething
Messages: Value is false
Mocking
The mock package allows the creation of mock objects. These objects can be used to attach expectations to method calls.
As in most statically typed languages that don’t allow monkey patching, creating a mock is somewhat time consuming.
Let’s say we have a function that takes an object that implements the Database interface. It then tries to connect to this database and send a message to it:
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type Database interface {
connect() error
sendMessage(*string) error
}
func Talk(o Database, message *string) error {
err := o.connect()
if err != nil {
return errors.New("Connection failed")
}
err = o.sendMessage(message)
if err != nil {
return errors.New("Sending message failed")
}
return nil
}
We want to test that Talk will return an error if it fails to connect or send the message. If everything goes well, it will return nil.
To make testing easier, we will create a mock that implements the Database interface (otherwise we would be connecting to a real database and we would run into many complications).
Let’s look into how to create a mock step by step. First, we need to create a struct that extends mock.Mock:
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package main
import (
"testing"
"github.com/stretchr/testify/mock"
)
type MockDatabase struct {
mock.Mock
}
This mock doesn’t yet satisfy the Database interface, we need to manually write all method definitions:
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func (db *MockDatabase) connect() error {
args := db.Called()
return args.Error(0)
}
func (db *MockDatabase) sendMessage(message *string) error {
args := db.Called(message)
return args.Error(0)
}
Both method definitions are very similar. db.Called tells the mock that a method was called with a set of arguments and it returns the corresponding return arguments for that call (This will make a little more sense when we look into setting expectations).
The args object holds the values that we should return for that call, the only thing left to do is return them. We use args.Error(0) to retrieve the first return argument of type error. If we didn’t know the type we could use args.Get(0). If we had multiple return arguments, we can retrieve each of them based on the index. For example: return args.Get(0), args.Error(1), for a method that returns a struct and an error.
Let’s look at a test that verifies that no error is returned if the message is sent successfully:
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func TestSuccess(t *testing.T) {
db := new(MockDatabase)
message := "Hello"
// Set expectations
db.On("connect").Return(nil)
db.On("sendMessage", &message).Return(nil)
err := Talk(db, &message)
assert.Equal(t, nil, err, "No error")
db.AssertExpectations(t)
}
We start by creating a new instance of MockDatabase. The next interesting part is the setting of expectations:
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db.On("connect").Return(nil)
db.On("sendMessage", &message).Return(nil)
What we are doing here is telling the mock:
- When you see a call to
connect, returnnil - When you see
sendMessagecalled with the given memory address (&messagewill be translated to the memory address of the message variable) returnnil
So, comming back to one of our mocked methods:
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func (db *MockDatabase) sendMessage(message *string) error {
args := db.Called(message)
return args.Error(0)
}
The first line will tell the mock: “There was a call to sendMessage with this memory address, what should I return. If the mock finds that return arguments were set, it will return those arguments. If it doesn’t find any expectations for that call, the test will fail.
We can use db.On... to set different return values for each test, so we can test different things. Here are some tests I wrote:
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package main
import (
"testing"
"errors"
"github.com/stretchr/testify/mock"
"github.com/stretchr/testify/assert"
)
type MockDatabase struct {
mock.Mock
}
func (db *MockDatabase) connect() error {
args := db.Called()
return args.Error(0)
}
func (db *MockDatabase) sendMessage(message *string) error {
args := db.Called(message)
return args.Error(0)
}
func TestSuccess(t *testing.T) {
db := new(MockDatabase)
message := "Hello"
// Set expectations
db.On("connect").Return(nil)
db.On("sendMessage", &message).Return(nil)
err := Talk(db, &message)
assert.Equal(t, nil, err, "No error")
db.AssertExpectations(t)
}
func TestErrorOnConnect(t *testing.T) {
db := new(MockDatabase)
// Set expectations
db.On("connect").Return(errors.New("Some error"))
message := "Hello"
err := Talk(db, &message)
assert.NotEqual(t, nil, err, "An error is thrown if connection fails")
db.AssertExpectations(t)
}
func TestErrorOnMessage(t *testing.T) {
db := new(MockDatabase)
message := "Hello"
// Set expectations
db.On("connect").Return(nil)
db.On("sendMessage", &message).Return(errors.New("Some error"))
err := Talk(db, &message)
assert.NotEqual(t, nil, err, "An error is thrown if sendMessage fails")
db.AssertExpectations(t)
}
In the tests above, I also used db.AssertExpectations(t). This will fail if any of the expectations (set with db.On...) is not called. This is not necessary for all tests, and you might decide not to use it if your testing style is more loose.
The mock package provides a lot of functionality that I’m not covering here. If you have more sofisticated needs, you might want to take a look at the documentation.
Conclusion
The standard Golang test package provides very limited functionality for writing tests. The testify package makes it easier to create cleaner tests by providing useful assertions and a way to create mocks that would otherwise require a lot of code.
automation golang programming testing