TIL: How to Separate our Golang Tests

TIL: How to Separate our Golang Tests

Sometimes we want to be able to run our unit tests and integration tests separately. In Golang we can do this using build tags, build tags are used to tell the compiler important information when we run go build ¹.

Let say we have a file called package_test.go. By adding // +build integration to the top of the file without any whitespace. This test file will only be run when we specify the tags in our test command go test --tags=integration.

Our integration test file would look something like:

// +build integration

package mypackage_test

Our unit tests can be left without any build tags and can be run with go test like normal.

To get this to compile correctly with VS Code we need to add the following to settings.json file.

{
  "go.buildFlags": [
      "-tags=integration"
  ],
  "go.testTags": "integration",
}