Profiles

GoConvey Test Package Profiles

When using the web UI it would be nice to be able to customize the flags used when running go test in a specific package*. It would also be nice to somehow mark a package as persistently ignored or disabled so that when the UI starts sometime in the future, you don't have to click ignore on that package again. Well, there's a way to do both of those things by creating a text file in that package that satisfied the following regex:

.+\.goconvey

Examples of good names:

• example.goconvey
• hi.goconvey

Examples of bad names:

• .goconvey
• hi.txt

The contents of that text file may include blank lines, commented lines (start the line with a # or //), test flags (-short, etc...) or the word ignore (casing is unimportant). The only hard and fast rule is that if you include the word ignore it must come before any test flags.

The result of creating such a file is that if ignore is found as the first non-comment, non-blank line, the package will be ignored by the GoConvey server until that line is removed or commented. Otherwise, all non-blank, non-comment lines are treated as arguments to be used whenever calling go test on your package (like when you save a file). Most of these arguments will probably arguments defined by the golang testing command but you can include arbitrary arguments to your package. There are only a few caveats to be aware of:

1. -v is always used so there's no need to ever include this flag.
2. -cover, -covermode and -coverprofile are specified by the GoConvey server so including these flags will have no effect. (Let me know if you really want to be able to specify -covermode for values other than set which is what GoConvey uses by default.)
3. -tags will be passed appropriately through to go test, go list, etc. calls, so if you need a special tag to build your package or your tests, it should get picked up correctly.
4. Many of the profiling/benchmarking flags haven't really been used much be the core goconvey developers so we aren't sure if they will work as they normally do when applied to a goconvey package profile.

Far from being an exhaustive list, here are some intended use cases:

• Using the -short flag can allow you to toggle execution of long-running integration tests.
• Using the -run flag can allow you to focus on specific test functions in a package. Combined with FocusConvey you could limit test execution to a single test case within a single test function--handy if displaying lots of debug information.
• Using the -timeout flag may help prevent manual restarts of the goconvey server in the event of a mistaken infinite loop (come on, admit it--you know it's happened to you!).

Please see the examples.goconvey profile in the examples package (github.com/smartystreets/goconvey/examples) for, well, an example. Happy testing!

• A profile only applies to the containing package (same folder), not any nested packages (sub-folders).