Simple example with testing

• testing
• test

In this example we have a single-file Go "application" called comp.go that has a main function and an additional function called add that is supposed to add two integers together and return the result. If you look carefully you might notice that we have a typo in the code, but that's there on purpose. Our goal now is to see how can we verify this code.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	res := add(2, 2)
	fmt.Println(res)
}

func add(a, b int) int {
	return a * b
}

So we have an additional file called comp_test.go. This belongs to the same main package and it imports the testing package. It has a function called TestAdd that received a pointer to a testing.T instance. Remember, not we are going to call this function, but the testing system of Go. Inside the function we have a call to t.Log which is just some logging information. Then we call the add function that resides in the same package but in the main file. We pass two numbers an accept the results. This is how we would normally use the functions.

Then we have the interesting part. We compare the received value with the expected value which is 4. If they are not the same, we call the t.Error function to report the problem. We can put any text there.

That's it.

package main

import "testing"

func TestAdd(t *testing.T) {
	t.Log("Hello from the test")
	total := add(2, 2)
	if total != 4 {
		t.Error("Sum was incorrect")
	}
}

We can now run the tests:

go test

to get the following output:

PASS
ok  	_/home/gabor/work/slides/golang/examples/simple-test	0.001s

We could also pass the -v flag to get a bit more verbose output.

go test -v

=== RUN   TestSum
    TestSum: comp_test.go:6: Hello from the test
--- PASS: TestSum (0.00s)
PASS
ok  	_/home/gabor/work/slides/golang/examples/simple-test	0.003s