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• Ginkgo uses Go's testing package and can live alongside your existing testing tests. It's easy to bootstrap and start writing your first tests

• Structure your BDD-style tests expressively:

  • Nestable Describe and Context container blocks
  • BeforeEach and AfterEach blocks for setup and teardown
  • It blocks that hold your assertions
  • JustBeforeEach blocks that separate creation from configuration (also known as the subject action pattern).
  • BeforeSuite and AfterSuite blocks to prep for and cleanup after a suite.

• A comprehensive test runner that lets you:

  • Mark specs as pending
  • Focus individual specs, and groups of specs, either programmatically or on the command line
  • Run your tests in random order, and then reuse random seeds to replicate the same order.
  • Break up your test suite into parallel processes for straightforward test parallelization

• Built-in support for testing asynchronicity

• Built-in support for benchmarking your code. Control the number of benchmark samples as you gather runtimes and other, arbitrary, bits of numerical information about your code.

• ginkgo: a command line interface with plenty of handy command line arguments for running your tests and generating test files. Here are a few choice examples:

  • ginkgo -nodes=N runs your tests in N parallel processes and print out coherent output in realtime
  • ginkgo -cover runs your tests using Golang's code coverage tool
  • ginkgo convert converts an XUnit-style testing package to a Ginkgo-style package
  • ginkgo -focus="REGEXP" and ginkgo -skip="REGEXP" allow you to specify a subset of tests to run via regular expression
  • ginkgo -r runs all tests suites under the current directory
  • ginkgo -v prints out identifying information for each tests just before it runs
  • ginkgo watch watches packages for changes, then reruns tests

  And much more: run ginkgo help for details!

  The ginkgo CLI is convenient, but purely optional -- Ginkgo works just fine with go test

• Straightforward support for third-party testing libraries such as Gomock and Testify. Check out the docs for details.

• A modular architecture that lets you easily:

  • Write custom reporters (for example, Ginkgo comes with a JUnit XML reporter and a TeamCity reporter).
  • Adapt an existing matcher library (or write your own!) to work with Ginkgo

Learn more about Gomega here

You'll need Golang v1.2+ (Ubuntu users: you probably have Golang v1.0 -- you'll need to upgrade!)

go get github.com/onsi/ginkgo/ginkgo  # installs the ginkgo CLI
go get github.com/onsi/gomega         # fetches the matcher library

cd path/to/package/you/want/to/test

ginkgo bootstrap # set up a new ginkgo suite
ginkgo generate  # will create a sample test file.  edit this file and add your tests then...

go test # to run your tests

ginkgo  # also runs your tests

Of course, I heartily recommend Ginkgo and Gomega. Both packages are seeing heavy, daily, production use on a number of projects and boast a mature and comprehensive feature-set.

With that said, it's great to know what your options are :)

Testing is a first class citizen in Golang, however Go's built-in testing primitives are somewhat limited: The testing package provides basic XUnit style tests and no assertion library.

A number of matcher libraries have been written to augment Go's built-in XUnit style tests. Here are two that have gained traction:

• testify
• gocheck

You can also use Ginkgo's matcher library Gomega in XUnit style tests

There are a handful of BDD-style testing frameworks written for Golang. Here are a few:

• Ginkgo ;)
• GoConvey
• Goblin
• Mao
• Zen

Finally, @shageman has put together a comprehensive comparison of golang testing libraries.

Go explore!

Ginkgo is MIT-Licensed

ginkgo watch uses fsnotify which is embedded in the source to simplify distribution. fsnotify has a BSD-style license. This dependency will be removed when fsnotify is added to Golang's standard library in v1.3