Jump to the docs to learn more. To start rolling your Ginkgo tests now keep reading!

If you have a question, comment, bug report, feature request, etc. please open a GitHub issue, or visit the Ginkgo Slack channel.

TLDR

Ginkgo builds on Go's testing package, allowing expressive Behavior-Driven Development ("BDD") style tests. It is typically (and optionally) paired with the Gomega matcher library.

Describe("the strings package", func() {
  Context("strings.Contains()", func() {
    When("the string contains the substring in the middle", func() {
      It("returns `true`", func() {
        Expect(strings.Contains("Ginkgo is awesome", "is")).To(BeTrue())
      })
    })
  })
})

Feature List

• 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

• Ginkgo allows you to write tests in Go using expressive Behavior-Driven Development ("BDD") style:

  • Nestable Describe, Context and When container blocks
  • BeforeEach and AfterEach blocks for setup and teardown
  • It and Specify 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

• 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 Go'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

  And much more: run ginkgo help for details!

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

• ginkgo watch watches packages and their dependencies for changes, then reruns tests. Run tests immediately as you develop!

• 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.

• Completions for Sublime Text: just use Package Control to install Ginkgo Completions.

• Completions for VSCode: just use VSCode's extension installer to install vscode-ginkgo.

• 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

Gomega: Ginkgo's Preferred Matcher Library

Ginkgo is best paired with Gomega. Learn more about Gomega here

Agouti: A Go Acceptance Testing Framework

Agouti allows you run WebDriver integration tests. Learn more about Agouti here

Getting Started

You'll need the Go command-line tools. Follow the installation instructions if you don't have it installed.

Global installation

To install the Ginkgo command line interface:

go get -u github.com/onsi/ginkgo/ginkgo

Note that this will install it to $GOBIN, which will need to be in the $PATH (or equivalent). Run go help install for more information.

Go module "tools package":

Create (or update) a file called tools/tools.go with the following contents:

// +build tools

package tools

import (
	_ "github.com/onsi/ginkgo/ginkgo"
)

// This file imports packages that are used when running go generate, or used
// during the development process but not otherwise depended on by built code.

The Ginkgo command can then be run via go run github.com/onsi/ginkgo/ginkgo. This approach allows the version of Ginkgo to be maintained under source control for reproducible results, and is well suited to automated test pipelines.

Bootstrapping

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

I'm new to Go: What are my testing options?

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 :)

What Go gives you out of the box

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

Matcher libraries for Go's XUnit style tests

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

BDD style testing frameworks

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

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

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

Go explore!

License

Ginkgo is MIT-Licensed

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md