Hey there! Thanks for checking in again! This week, I've been trying to implement unit testing for my Open Source project SSGo. Let me tell you more about how I did it.

Gathering prerequisites

In my unit tests, I wanted to check HTML parsing capabilities of SSGo; however, my code was not structured properly for that.

HTML parsing was not enclosed in a separate function, rather it was a part of a big GenerateHTML function, which created needed files, read from existing files and generated HTML. I needed to first refactor the code a bit.

I separated ParseText and ParseMarkdown functions for parsing .txt and .md files respectively, which also allowed to fix a couple of bugs and inconsistencies in code.

Now, it was time to finally write some tests.

Choosing the testing tools

I saw a very interesting blog post regarding testing frameworks in Go, which helped me pick from a formed list.

It is very handy that Go has it's own built-in testing tool, which runs every file that ends with _test.go. It also allows for coverage reports and individual test runs.

All you have to do to run the tests is run go test <package_name> and that's it!

I also used github.com/stretchr/testify package for easier assertions using Equal function.

Tests I implemented

There is actually not much I could test before performing the refactoring of my code because almost every function had file i/o in it, which is not the best when dealing with unit tests.

So, after I refactored a part of my code, I made some tests for ParseText and ParseMarkdown general and edge cases.

I also made a couple of tests for GetNameAndExt function that separates the file name and its extension.

It was also important to document everything for coming developers, so I mentioned everything in CONTRIBUTING.md. Come check it out if you want :)

After I was done, I squashed all my commits into one and merged it to master.