Essential Go Testing  Edit on GitHub      File Issue

Example tests (self documenting tests)

This type of tests make sure that your code compiles properly and will appear in the generated documentation for your project. In addition to that, the example tests can assert that your test produces proper output.


package sum

// Sum calculates the sum of two integers
func Sum(a, b int) int {
    return a + b


package sum

import "fmt"

func ExampleSum() {
    x := Sum(1, 2)
    fmt.Println(Sum(-1, -1))
    fmt.Println(Sum(0, 0))

    // Output:
    // 3
    // -2
    // 0

To execute your test, run go test in the folder containing those files OR put those two files in a sub-folder named sum and then from the parent folder execute go test ./sum. In both cases you will get an output similar to this:

ok      so/sum    0.005s

If you are wondering how this is testing your code, here is another example function, which actually fails the test:

func ExampleSum_fail() {
    x := Sum(1, 2)

    // Output:
    // 5

When you run go test, you get the following output:

$ go test
--- FAIL: ExampleSum_fail (0.00s)
exit status 1
FAIL    so/sum    0.006s

If you want to see the documentation for your sum package – just run:

go doc -http=:6060

and navigate to http://localhost:6060/pkg/FOLDER/sum/, where FOLDER is the folder containing the sum package (in this example so). The documentation for the sum method looks like this:

enter image description here

  ↑ ↓ to navigate     ↵ to select     Esc to close