Parallel tests in Go

18 January 2016

Go surprises me with how simple it makes things. Today, it was parallel testing. In other languages I’ve used, it may require third-party packages, require complicated syntax, or may just not be possible. In Go, it’s as simple as:

import "testing"

func TestMeow(t *testing.T) {
    t.Parallel()
    // test logic here
}

func TestRoar(t *testing.T) {
    t.Parallel()
    // test logic here
}

func TestBark(t *testing.T) {
    // test logic here
}

Tests marked with t.Parallel() will execute in parallel with other tests also marked with t.Parallel(). So the tests TestMeow() and TestRoar() will run in parallel, but TestBark() will not.

In case you want to run tests serially despite marking them parallel, you can set the test.parallel flag instead of commenting out each t.Parallel() call.

$ go test -test.parallel 1

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