Go test

Skill G1Joshi/Agent-Skills/skills/testing/go-test

A comprehensive skill catalog for AI agents

Install

npx -y skills add G1Joshi/Agent-Skills --skill go-test

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Go testing package. Use for Go testing.

SKILL.md

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Go Test

Go has a built-in testing framework in the testing package. It follows Go's effective, minimalist philosophy: no magic, just code.

When to Use

Go Projects: It is the standard. No 3rd party runner needed.
Benchmarks: Built-in support (func BenchmarkXxx(b *testing.B)).

Quick Start

// main_test.go
package main

import "testing"

func TestAdd(t *testing.T) {
    got := Add(1, 2)
    want := 3
    if got != want {
        t.Errorf("Add(1, 2) = %d; want %d", got, want)
    }
}

Run with go test ./....

Core Concepts

Table Driven Tests

The idiomatic way to write Go tests. Define a slice of structs with input/output, then loop range over them.

tests := []struct {
    input int
    want  int
}{
    {1, 2},
    {2, 4},
}
for _, tc := range tests {
    t.Run("subtest", func(t *testing.T) { ... })
}

Subtests (`t.Run`)

Allows hierarchical test execution and reporting.

Helper Functions

Use t.Helper() in utility functions so that failure logs point to the test caller, not the helper line.

Best Practices (2025)

Do:

Use testify/assert: If you hate if got != want, use the testify library for assert.Equal(t, want, got). It's the most accepted "lib" extension.
Run with -race: go test -race ./... to detect race conditions.
Parallelism: Use t.Parallel() inside tests to speed up execution.

Don't:

Don't use assertions for everything: Go prefers explicit error checking.
Don't ignore errors: If a setup step fails, use t.Fatal to stop the test immediately.

References

Go Testing Package