Almost everything is a CLI application when writing Go. At least for me. Even when I write an HTTP daemon I still have to design a UX for configuration injection, environment variables, flags and things like that.
The set of libraries I use is very standard, I use Cobra, pflags and occasionally Viper. I can say, without a doubt that Steve Francia is awesome!
This is how a command looks like directly from the Cobra documentation:
var rootCmd = &cobra.Command{
Use: "hugo",
Short: "Hugo is a very fast static site generator",
Long: `A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator built with
love by spf13 and friends in Go.
Complete documentation is available at http://hugo.spf13.com`,
Run: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) {
// Do Stuff Here
},
}
I like to write a constructor function that returns a command, in this case it will be something like:
func NewRootCmd() *cobra.Command {
return &cobra.Command{
Use: "hugo",
Short: "Hugo is a very fast static site generator",
Long: `A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator built with
love by spf13 and friends in Go.
Complete documentation is available at http://hugo.spf13.com`,
Run: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) {
// Do Stuff Here
},
}
}
The reason why I like the have this function is because it helps me to clearly see the dependency my command requires. In this case nothing. I also like to use not the Run function but the RunE one, it works in the same way but it expects an error in return.
func NewRootCmd(in string) *cobra.Command {
return &cobra.Command{
Use: "hugo",
Short: "Hugo is a very fast static site generator",
Long: `A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator built with
love by spf13 and friends in Go.
Complete documentation is available at http://hugo.spf13.com`,
RunE: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) (error) {
fmt.Fprintf(cmd.OutOrStdout(), in)
return nil
},
}
}
In order to execute the command, I use cmd.Execute().
Let’s write a test function:
The output with go test -v contains “hi” because by default cobra prints to
stdout, but we can replace it to assert that automatically
func Test_ExecuteCommand(t *testing.T) {
cmd := NewRootCmd("hi")
cmd.Execute()
}
=== RUN Test_ExecuteCommand
hi--- PASS: Test_ExecuteCommand (0.00s)
PASS
ok ciao 0.006s
The trick here is to replace the stdout with something that we can read programmatically like a bytes.Buffer for example:
func Test_ExecuteCommand(t *testing.T) {
cmd := NewRootCmd("hi")
b := bytes.NewBufferString("")
cmd.SetOut(b)
cmd.Execute()
out, err := ioutil.ReadAll(b)
if err != nil {
t.Fatal(err)
}
if string(out) != "hi" {
t.Fatalf("expected \"%s\" got \"%s\"", "hi", string(out))
}
}
Personally I do not think there is much more to know in order to effectively test CLI commands, they can be very complex, but if you can mock its dependencies and check what the execution prints out you are very flexible!
Another thing you have to control when running a command is its arguments and its flags because based on them you will get different behavior that you have to test in order to figure out that your commands work with all of them.
The logic works the same for both but arguments are very easy, you just have to
set the argument in the command with the function
cmd.SetArgs([]string{"hello-by-args"}).
package main
import (
"bytes"
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"testing"
"github.com/spf13/cobra"
)
func NewRootCmd() *cobra.Command {
return &cobra.Command{
Use: "hugo",
Short: "Hugo is a very fast static site generator",
RunE: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) error {
fmt.Fprintf(cmd.OutOrStdout(), args[0])
return nil
},
}
}
func Test_ExecuteCommand(t *testing.T) {
cmd := NewRootCmd()
b := bytes.NewBufferString("")
cmd.SetOut(b)
cmd.SetArgs([]string{"hi-via-args"})
cmd.Execute()
out, err := ioutil.ReadAll(b)
if err != nil {
t.Fatal(err)
}
if string(out) != "hi-via-args" {
t.Fatalf("expected \"%s\" got \"%s\"", "hi-via-args", string(out))
}
}
Flags works in the same:
package main
import (
"bytes"
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"testing"
"github.com/spf13/cobra"
)
var in string
func NewRootCmd() *cobra.Command {
cmd := &cobra.Command{
Use: "hugo",
Short: "Hugo is a very fast static site generator",
RunE: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) error {
fmt.Fprintf(cmd.OutOrStdout(), in)
return nil
},
}
cmd.Flags().StringVar(&in, "in", "", "This is a very important input.")
return cmd
}
func Test_ExecuteCommand(t *testing.T) {
cmd := NewRootCmd()
b := bytes.NewBufferString("")
cmd.SetOut(b)
cmd.SetArgs([]string{"--in", "testisawesome"})
cmd.Execute()
out, err := ioutil.ReadAll(b)
if err != nil {
t.Fatal(err)
}
if string(out) != "testisawesome" {
t.Fatalf("expected \"%s\" got \"%s\"", "testisawesome", string(out))
}
}
This is it! I like a lot to write unit tests for cli command because in real life they are way more complex than the one I used here. It means that they run a lot more functions but the command is well scoped in terms of dependencies (if you write a constructor function) and in terms of input and output. So it is easy to write an assertion and write table tests with different inputs.