Unit testing in Go

In this article let's discuss how we can write simple unit tests in go.

All the code from this article is available on github

I've also made a video, if you like to follow along!

Writing our first unit test

Initialize a sample module

go mod init sample

Let's start with adding a length.go file with a Length function. This function simply returns the length of the input string.

In go, tests file are usually named with _test (just like we do .test.js for jest). Let's create length_test.go.

This is a very basic test function in which we'll be testing out our Length function

Let's add some test logic

Let's run it!

go test

Yay! our test passed!

PASS
ok      sample  0.429s

Now let's change our expected variable to 5, and re-run our test and we should see the test fail

--- FAIL: Test (0.00s)
    length_test.go:10: Expected 5 Got 4
FAIL
exit status 1
FAIL    sample  0.334s

Multiple test cases

Let's add out test cases with input and expected outputs

This approach is similar to test.each from jest

Update Test_Length function to use testCases

Run the test cases!

PASS
ok      sample  0.347s

Great! Thank you all for reading this article, if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach to me on twitter