Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Using environment variables to set up or skip tests

In a project of any size, you are eventually bound to come across a series of tests that depend on external resources that are created or configured in an ad hoc fashion.

A typical example of such a use case would be a test suite that talks to a database. As the engineers working locally on the code base, we would probably spin up a local database instance with a more or less predictable endpoint and use that for testing. However, when running under CI, we might be required to use an already provisioned database instance on some cloud provider or, more often than not, the CI setup phase may need to start a database in a Docker container, a process that would yield a non-predictable endpoint ...