#CLI Unit Testing Recommendations

4 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

stuck jacinth
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Hello folks,
I have a CLI tool in Golang which uses Cobra (https://github.com/spf13/cobra/). What are recommendations/best practices on how to test a CLI application?

drowsy sage
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your application logic should be entirely separated from whatever actually interacts with it (EG. CLI or REST API, or gRPC etc). By separating your core logic, you can make it testable, and also expandable if you want to add more ways to interact with it in the future

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I assume you're after testing of your application logic, and not testing the CLI code which should just be parsing config from whatever sources (env vars, flags, etc) and calling your application logic

weary isle
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Have a look at https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/test-scripts for testing cli behavior (I use a fork of testscript to test my CLIs e2e, doesn’t replace unit tests of main logic as mentioned but is also useful (I don’t use cobra though but it should work)

Bitfield Consulting
Test scripts in Go — Bitfield Consulting

Wouldn’t it be great if we could write tests for our Go CLI tools that are simple as shell scripts? The testscript package lets us do exactly that. Let’s take it for a spin.