Warning: this package will wipe the database data before loading the fixtures! It is supposed to be used on a test database. Please, double check if you are running it against the correct database.
TIP: There are options not described in this README page. It's recommended that you also check the documentation.
Writing tests is hard, even more when you have to deal with an SQL database. This package aims to make writing functional tests for web apps written in Go easier.
Basically this package mimics the "Ruby on Rails' way" of writing tests for database applications, where sample data is kept in fixtures files. Before the execution of every test, the test database is cleaned and the fixture data is loaded into the database.
The idea is running tests against a real database, instead of relying in mocks, which is boring to setup and may lead to production bugs not being caught in the tests.
First, import it like this:
import (
"github.com/go-testfixtures/testfixtures/v3"
)
Create a folder for the fixture files. Each file should contain data for a
single table and have the name <table_name>.yml
:
myapp/
myapp.go
myapp_test.go
...
fixtures/
posts.yml
comments.yml
tags.yml
posts_tags.yml
...
The file would look like this (it can have as many record you want):
# comments.yml
- id: 1
post_id: 1
content: A comment...
author_name: John Doe
author_email: john@doe.com
created_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
updated_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
- id: 2
post_id: 2
content: Another comment...
author_name: John Doe
author_email: john@doe.com
created_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
updated_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
# ...
An YAML object or array will be converted to JSON. It will be stored on a native JSON type like JSONB on PostgreSQL & CockroachDB or as a TEXT or VARCHAR column on other databases.
- id: 1
post_attributes:
author: John Due
author_email: john@due.com
title: "..."
tags:
- programming
- go
- testing
post: "..."
Binary columns can be represented as hexadecimal strings (should start with 0x
):
- id: 1
binary_column: 0x1234567890abcdef
If you need to write raw SQL, probably to call a function, prefix the value
of the column with RAW=
:
- id: 1
uuid_column: RAW=uuid_generate_v4()
postgis_type_column: RAW=ST_GeomFromText('params...')
created_at: RAW=NOW()
updated_at: RAW=NOW()
Your tests would look like this:
package myapp
import (
"database/sql"
_ "github.com/lib/pq"
"github.com/go-testfixtures/testfixtures/v3"
)
var (
db *sql.DB
fixtures *testfixtures.Loader
)
func TestMain(m *testing.M) {
var err error
// Open connection to the test database.
// Do NOT import fixtures in a production database!
// Existing data would be deleted.
db, err = sql.Open("postgres", "dbname=myapp_test")
if err != nil {
...
}
fixtures, err = testfixtures.New(
testfixtures.Database(db), // You database connection
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"), // Available: "postgresql", "timescaledb", "mysql", "mariadb", "sqlite" and "sqlserver"
testfixtures.Directory("testdata/fixtures"), // The directory containing the YAML files
)
if err != nil {
...
}
os.Exit(m.Run())
}
func prepareTestDatabase() {
if err := fixtures.Load(); err != nil {
...
}
}
func TestX(t *testing.T) {
prepareTestDatabase()
// Your test here ...
}
func TestY(t *testing.T) {
prepareTestDatabase()
// Your test here ...
}
func TestZ(t *testing.T) {
prepareTestDatabase()
// Your test here ...
}
Alternatively, you can use the Files
option, to specify which
files you want to load into the database:
fixtures, err := testfixtures.New(
testfixtures.Database(db),
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"),
testfixtures.Files(
"fixtures/orders.yml",
"fixtures/customers.yml",
),
)
if err != nil {
...
}
With Paths
option, you can specify the paths that fixtures will load
from. Path can be directory or file. If directory, we will search YAML files
in it.
fixtures, err := testfixtures.New(
testfixtures.Database(db),
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"),
testfixtures.Paths(
"fixtures/orders.yml",
"fixtures/customers.yml",
"common_fixtures/users"
),
)
if err != nil {
...
}
You can use the FilesMultiTables
option, to specify which
files you want to load into the database with support multiple tables
(file name does not affect table names):
fixtures, err := testfixtures.New(
testfixtures.Database(db),
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"),
testfixtures.FilesMultiTables(
"fixtures/test_case1.yml",
"fixtures/test_case2.yml",
"fixtures/posts_comments.yml",
),
)
if err != nil {
...
}
The file would look like this (it can have as many tables and records you want):
# test_case1.yml
posts:
- id: 1
post_id: 1
content: A comment...
author_name: John Doe
author_email: john@doe.com
created_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
updated_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
- id: 2
post_id: 2
content: Another comment...
author_name: John Doe
author_email: john@doe.com
created_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
updated_at: 2020-12-31 23:59:59
comments:
- id: 1
post_id: 1
content: Post 1 comment 1
author_name: John Doe
author_email: john@doe.com
created_at: 2016-01-01 12:30:12
updated_at: 2016-01-01 12:30:12
# ...
In order to prevent you from accidentally wiping the wrong database, this package will refuse to load fixtures if the database name (or database filename for SQLite) doesn't contains "test". If you want to disable this check, use:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.DangerousSkipTestDatabaseCheck(),
)
If you want to disable cleanup, you can also do like below. This is usually not recommended, and should be used mostly for debugging.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.DangerousSkipCleanupFixtureTables(),
)
Checksums of each table in a database are computed at the end of each Load()
,
so subsequent calls to Load()
do not reload the same data again, if nothing
has changed in between.
The drawback is that it can be slow for database with many tables. Also, it does not
make sense to compute checksum, if you run Load()
only once.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.SkipTableChecksumComputation(),
)
For PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB, this package also resets all sequences to a high number to prevent duplicated primary keys while running the tests. The default is 10000, but you can change that with:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.ResetSequencesTo(10000),
)
Or, if you want to skip the reset of sequences entirely:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.SkipResetSequences(),
)
By default, when using ClickHouse, this library will use TRUNCATE ...
to
clean the database. If you want to force the use of DELETE FROM ...
you can
do it by doing:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.ClickhouseUseDeleteFrom(),
)
This package has three approaches to disable foreign keys while importing fixtures for PostgreSQL databases:
This is the default approach. For that use:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"), // or "timescaledb"
)
With the above snippet this package will use DISABLE TRIGGER
to temporarily
disabling foreign key constraints while loading fixtures. This work with any
version of PostgreSQL, but it is required to be connected in the database
as a SUPERUSER. You can make a PostgreSQL user a SUPERUSER with:
ALTER USER your_user SUPERUSER;
This approach don't require to be connected as a SUPERUSER, but only work with PostgreSQL versions >= 9.4. Try this if you are getting foreign key violation errors with the previous approach. It is as simple as using:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"),
testfixtures.UseAlterConstraint(),
)
This approach is implemented to support databases that do not support above methods (namely CockroachDB).
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("postgres"),
testfixtures.UseDropConstraint(),
)
Tested using the github.com/lib/pq and github.com/jackc/pgx drivers.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("mysql"), // or "mariadb"
)
Tested using the github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql driver.
You can use the multistatement parameter in the connection string to execute some of the setup statements in one query (instead of one query per statement) for a faster execution.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("mysql"), // or "mariadb"
testfixtures.AllowMultipleStatementsInOneQuery(),
)
SQLite is also supported. It is recommended to create foreign keys as
DEFERRABLE
(the default) to prevent problems. See more
on the SQLite documentation.
(Foreign key constraints are no-op by default on SQLite, but enabling it is
recommended).
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("sqlite"),
)
Tested using the github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 driver.
SQL Server support requires SQL Server >= 2008. Inserting on IDENTITY
columns
are handled as well. Just make sure you are logged in with a user with
ALTER TABLE
permission.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("sqlserver"),
)
Tested using the mssql
and sqlserver
drivers from the
github.com/denisenkom/go-mssqldb lib.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("clickhouse"),
)
It's impossible to get Spanner database name to determine whether it's a test database or not. You need to make sure that you're actually using test database and use testfixtures.DangerousSkipTestDatabaseCheck()
to skip the check.
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Dialect("spanner"),
testfixtures.DangerousSkipTestDatabaseCheck(),
)
Testfixtures supports templating, but it's disabled by default. Most people won't need it, but it may be useful to dynamically generate data.
Enable it by doing:
testfixtures.New(
...
testfixtures.Template(),
// the above options are optional
TemplateFuncs(...),
TemplateDelims("{{", "}}"),
TemplateOptions("missingkey=zero"),
TemplateData(...),
)
The YAML file could look like this:
# It's possible generate values...
- id: {{sha256 "my-awesome-post}}
title: My Awesome Post
text: {{randomText}}
# ... or records
{{range $post := $.Posts}}
- id: {{$post.Id}}
title: {{$post.Title}}
text: {{$post.Text}}
{{end}}
The following code will generate a YAML file for each table of the database into a given folder. It may be useful to boostrap a test scenario from a sample database of your app.
dumper, err := testfixtures.NewDumper(
testfixtures.DumpDatabase(db),
testfixtures.DumpDialect("postgres"), // or your database of choice
testfixtures.DumpDirectory("tmp/fixtures"),
testfixtures.DumpTables( // optional, will dump all table if not given
"posts",
"comments",
"tags",
),
)
if err != nil {
...
}
if err := dumper.Dump(); err != nil {
...
}
This was intended to run in small sample databases. It will likely break if run in a production/big database.
This library doesn't yet support running tests in parallel! Running tests in parallel can result in random data being present in the database, which will likely cause tests to randomly/intermittently fail.
This is specially tricky since it's not immediately clear that go test ./...
run tests for each package in parallel. If more than one package use this
library, you can face this issue. Please, use go test -p 1 ./...
or run tests
for each package in separated commands to fix this issue.
If you're looking into being able to run tests in parallel you can try using testfixtures together with the txdb package, which allows wrapping each test run in a transaction.
We also have a CLI to load fixtures in a given database.
Grab it from the releases page or install with Homebrew:
brew install go-testfixtures/tap/testfixtures
Usage is like this:
# load
testfixtures -d postgres -c "postgres://user:password@localhost/database" -D testdata/fixtures
# dump
testfixtures --dump -d postgres -c "postgres://user:password@localhost/database" -D testdata/fixtures
The connection string changes for each database driver.
Use testfixtures --help
for all flags.
We recommend you to install Task and Docker before contributing to this package, since some stuff is automated using these tools.
It's recommended to use Docker Compose to run tests, since it runs tests for all supported databases once. To do that you just need to run:
task docker
But if you want to run tests locally, copy the .sample.env
file as .env
and edit it according to your database setup. You'll need to create a database
(likely names testfixtures_test
) before continuing. Then run the command
for the database you want to run tests against:
task test:pg # PostgreSQL
task test:crdb # CockroachDB
task test:mysql # MySQL
task test:sqlite # SQLite
task test:sqlserver # Microsoft SQL Server
GitHub Actions (CI) runs the same Docker setup available locally.
If you don't think using fixtures is a good idea, you can try one of these packages instead:
- factory-go: Factory for Go. Inspired by Python's Factory Boy and Ruby's Factory Girl
- fixtory: go generate based type-safe, DRY, flexible test fixture factory
- go-txdb (Single transaction SQL driver for Go): Use a single database transaction for each functional test, so you can rollback to previous state between tests to have the same database state in all tests
- go-sqlmock: A mock for the sql.DB interface. This allow you to unit test database code without having to connect to a real database
- dbcleaner - Clean database for testing, inspired by database_cleaner for Ruby