For Golang, I’m using HTTPMock. It allows me to configure a particular response to send when a particular request is received. In fact, you can queue up a few responses but I’m writing a really thin API client so nothing needs more than one call so far.

Inside each test, I configure the request to respond to and the response to send, something like this:

httpmock.Activate()
defer httpmock.DeactivateAndReset()

httpmock.RegisterResponder("GET", "https://api.nexmo.com/verify/json",
	func(req *http.Request) (*http.Response, error) {
		resp := httpmock.NewStringResponse(200, `
{
	"request_id": "abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789",
	"status": "0"
}
`,
		)

		resp.Header.Add("Content-Type", "application/json")
		return resp, nil
	},
)

What’s great about this is that the rest of my test looks “normal” – this tool hijacks the web requests my code would have made, and returns its own responses instead. So I go ahead and put in the test basically the code I’d put in an application that used the library I’m working on.

auth := CreateAuthFromKeySecret("12345678", "456")
client := NewVerifyClient(auth)
// the next line calls the code that actually makes the HTTP request that HTTPMock answers
response, _, _ := client.Request("44777000777", "NexmoGoTest", VerifyOpts{})

message := "Request ID: " + response.RequestId
if message != "Request ID: abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789" {
	t.Errorf("Verify request failed")
}

In contrast to the other languages I’ve used with XUnit-type testing, golang doesn’t really use the “assert” approach for testing, the idea is that you write code and if it doesn’t work, there’s your error. There are assertion libraries around but since I’m writing all new tests for basically new code, I thought I’d try “the go way” and see how it worked out. So far it’s definitely a new way of thinking but I feel equally confident in the tests I’m creating.

The magic really comes when I start adding failure cases to the tests, that way I can check that things fail the way I’d expect – and of course I can invent responses that the API should never be sending and check that the code also copes with the unexpected!