🎨 Beautify your Go tests on GitHub Actions

# Was this made for humans?

Although simple, Go’s default testing output leaves a lot to be desired:

This has led rise to some other wrappers for go test, solely to be a better formatter for humans. For example, gotestsum does this quite well:

This is definitely an improvement, and gotestsum even has additional formatting like exporting to JUnit XML.

But, what if CI could produce a rich, interactive, summary like this:

And interactive expansion for more details:

(Check out the example here!)

# Actions Job Summaries

One of the great features my team released recently was GitHub Actions Job Summaries. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a very simple way to get Markdown content as an output for a GitHub Actions job.

It’s relatively easy to use, we provide two mechanisms to write summary content:

Writing GitHub Flavored Markdown to the file at $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY on all GitHub Actions runners.
Utilizing the @actions/core’s TypeScript helper library.

And the latter is what I used to create go-test-action.

# Introducing: `go-test-action`

It should be easy to get a pretty test summary.

With go-test-action, all you need is to replace one line in your Actions Workflow:

name: CI

on:
  push:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Set up Go
      uses: actions/setup-go@v3
      with:
        go-version: 1.18

    - name: Build
      run: go build -v ./...

    - name: Test
-     run: go test ./...
+     uses: robherley/go-test-action@v0.1.0

If your test parameters are a bit more complicated or if you want to customize the summary structure, there are a few inputs that you can use:

Input	Default	Description
moduleDirectory	`.`	relative path to the directory containing the `go.mod` of the module you wish to test
testArguments	`./...`	arguments to pass to `go test`, `-json` will be prepended automatically
omitUntestedPackages	`false`	omit any go packages that don’t have any tests from the summary output
omitPie	`false`	omit the pie chart from the summary output

So if you really hate 🥧, you can change your Workflow to omit it:

    - name: Test
      uses: robherley/go-test-action@v0.1.0
      with:
        omitPie: true

For the most up-to-date list of inputs, check out the action.yml

# But how does it work?

When executing the tests, go-test-action will prepend the arguments with -json, that will convert the output to JSON using test2json.

The test2json JSON output is structured like so:

type TestEvent struct {
	Time    time.Time
	Action  string
	Package string
	Test    string
	Elapsed float64
	Output  string
}

The actual output is a bit chunky:

{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.92576-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example","Output":"?   \tgithub.com/robherley/go-test-example\t[no test files]\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.926603-04:00","Action":"skip","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example","Elapsed":0.001}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931066-04:00","Action":"run","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931141-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess","Output":"=== RUN   TestSuccess\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931166-04:00","Action":"run","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(1)"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931185-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(1)","Output":"=== RUN   TestSuccess/Subtest(1)\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931204-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(1)","Output":"    success_test.go:19: hello from subtest #1\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931239-04:00","Action":"run","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(2)"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931284-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(2)","Output":"=== RUN   TestSuccess/Subtest(2)\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.9313-04:00","Action":"output","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(2)","Output":"    success_test.go:19: hello from subtest #2\n"}
{"Time":"2022-07-10T22:42:11.931315-04:00","Action":"run","Package":"github.com/robherley/go-test-example/success","Test":"TestSuccess/Subtest(3)"}
// and more!

This JSON output is parsed, grouped and aggregated like so:

For every package level test, group the following:
- Count tests that have a conclusive attribute. Conclusive meaning their test2json output Action is either is pass, fail or skip.
- Repeat above for any subtests with a test (subtests in go with T.Run are naively indicated with a / in their name)

This logic is split between the parseTestEvents function and the PackageResult class. And once it’s all parsed, the attributes are rendered to Markdown by the Renderer class.

# Contribute!

Have an idea for a feature or want to report a bug? Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request!

Thanks for reading and happy testing! 🧪