How to share test interfaces between Go packages?

Question

Go doesn't share code between test files of different packages, so definitions of test interfaces aren't automatically reused. How can we work around this in practice?

Example using testing/quick:

foo/foo.go:

package foo

type Thing int

const (
  X Thing = iota
  Y
  Z
)

bar/bar.go:

package bar

import (
  "foo"
)

type Box struct {
  Thing foo.Thing
}

We want to property test foo, so we define testing/quick.Generate on Thing:

foo_test.go:

package foo

import (
  "math/rand"
  "reflect"
  "testing"
  "testing/quick"
  "time"
)

func (_ Thing) Generate(r *rand.Rand, sz int) reflect.Value {
  return reflect.ValueOf(Thing(r.Intn(3)))
}

func TestGenThing(t *testing.T) {
  r := rand.New(rand.NewSource(time.Now().UTC().UnixNano()))
  for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
    val, _ := quick.Value(reflect.TypeOf(Thing(0)), r)
    tng, _ := val.Interface().(Thing)
    t.Logf("%#v\n", tng)
  }
}

quick.Value returns Things in the range [0,3) as expected:

$ go test -v foo
=== RUN   TestGenThing
--- PASS: TestGenThing (0.00s)
        foo_test.go:20: 0
        foo_test.go:20: 1
        foo_test.go:20: 2
        foo_test.go:20: 1
        foo_test.go:20: 2
PASS
ok      foo     0.026s

Let's property test bar as well:

package bar

import (
  "math/rand"
  "reflect"
  "testing"
  "testing/quick"
  "time"

  "foo"
)

func (_ Box) Generate(r *rand.Rand, sz int) reflect.Value {
  val, _ := quick.Value(reflect.TypeOf(foo.Thing(0)), r)
  tng, _ := val.Interface().(foo.Thing)
  return reflect.ValueOf(Box{tng})
}

func TestGenBox(t *testing.T) {
  r := rand.New(rand.NewSource(time.Now().UTC().UnixNano()))
  for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
    val, _ := quick.Value(reflect.TypeOf(Box{}), r)
    box, _ := val.Interface().(Box)
    t.Logf("%#v\n", box)
  }
}

But Box.Generate is broken. foo_test.go isn't available to bar_test.go, so quick.Value() doesn't use Thing.Generate():

$ GOPATH=$PWD go test -v bar
=== RUN   TestGenBox
--- PASS: TestGenBox (0.00s)
        bar_test.go:24: bar.Box{Thing:3919143124849004253}
        bar_test.go:24: bar.Box{Thing:-3486832378211479055}
        bar_test.go:24: bar.Box{Thing:-3056230723958856466}
        bar_test.go:24: bar.Box{Thing:-847200811847403542}
        bar_test.go:24: bar.Box{Thing:-2593052978030148925}
PASS
ok      bar     0.095s

Is there a workaround for this? How do folks use testing/quick (or any other testing library with interfaces) in practice?

Answer 1

Any code shared between packages must be in a non-test file. That doesn't mean it has to be included in any final builds though; you can use build constraints to exclude the files from normal builds, and build tags to include them when running tests. For example, you can put your shared test code in a file prefixed with:

//+build testtools

package mypackage

(but not named _test.go). When you build, this will not be included in the build. When you test, you'd use something like:

go test -tags "testtools" ./...

This would include the constrained file in the build, and thereby make the shared code available to the tests.