How to run test cases in a specified file?
GoGo Problem Overview
My package test cases are scattered across multiple files, if I run go test <package_name>
it runs all test cases in the package.
It is unnecessary to run all of them though. Is there a way to specify a file for go test
to run, so that it only runs test cases defined in the file?
Go Solutions
Solution 1 - Go
There are two ways. The easy one is to use the -run
flag and provide a
pattern matching names of the tests you want to run. Example:
go test packageName -run NameOfTest
See the docs for more info.
Note that the -run
flag may also run other tests if they contain the string
NameOfTest
, as the -run
flag matches a regexp. So to ensure that only a
test named exactly 'NameOfTest' is run, one has to use the regexp ^NameOfTest$
:
go test -run "^NameOfTest$"
The other way is to name the specific file, containing the tests you want to run:
go test -v foo_test.go
But there's a catch. This works well if:
foo.go
is inpackage foo
.foo_test.go
is inpackage foo_test
and imports 'foo'.
If foo_test.go
and foo.go
are the same package (a common case) then you
must name all other files required to build foo_test
. In this example it
would be:
go test foo_test.go foo.go
I'd recommend to use the -run
pattern. Or, where/when possible, always run
all package tests.
Solution 2 - Go
@zzzz's answer is mostly complete, but just to save others from having to dig through the referenced documentation you can run a single test in a package as follows:
go test packageName -run TestName
Note that you want to pass in the name of the test, not the file name where the test exists.
The -run
flag actually accepts a regex so you could limit the test run to a class of tests. From the docs:
-run regexp
Run only those tests and examples matching the regular
expression.
Solution 3 - Go
When running a single test I usually do:
go test -run TestSomethingReallyCool ./folder1/folder2/ -v -count 1
-count 1
also ensures that the test is ran every time instead of being cached. Useful when you are testing against race conditions and have a test that fails only sometimes. In Go versions not using modules the same could be achieved by setting GOCACHE=off
but this interacts poorly with Go modules.
Solution 4 - Go
go test -v ./<package_name> -run Test
Prevents caching of test results.
go test -count=1 ./<package_name> -run Test
Solution 5 - Go
alias testcases="sed -n 's/func.*\(Test.*\)(.*/\1/p' | xargs | sed 's/ /|/g'"
go test -v -run $(cat coordinator_test.go | testcases)
Solution 6 - Go
Visual Studio Code shows a link at the top of a Go test file which lets you run all the tests in just that file.
In the "Output" window, you can see that it automatically generates a regex which contains all of the test names in the current file:
Running tool: C:\Go\bin\go.exe test -timeout 30s -run ^(TestFoo|TestBar|TestBaz)$ rootpackage\mypackage
Note: the very first time you open a Go file in VS Code it automatically offers to install some Go extensions for you. I assume the above requires that you have previously accepted the offer to install.
Solution 7 - Go
go test -v -timeout 30s <path_to_package> -run ^(TestFuncRegEx)
- The TestFunc must be inside a
go
test file in that package - We can provide a regular expression to match a set of test cases or just the exact test case function to run a single test case. For instance
-run TestCaseFunc
Solution 8 - Go
I was facing some issue to run a single specific test from my package this is how I solved
go test -v -race ./parsers/xml2csv/stld/ -timeout 30s -run '^Test_stldItemParser_readNodes$'
If I run without single quote it wasn't working I use oh-my-zsh
in Ubuntu-20.04
Here
-v for verbosity
-race to detect race condition
-timeout for the timeout of the test
This are optional can be omitted but good to add.