So first of all, what are build tags?
Build tags are basically conditional compilation mechanism provided by Go in which you can choose which files to include in the binary depending on tags specified in that file.
For example :
//go:build foo
// +build foo
func main(){
fmt.Println("hello world")
}The directive //go:build foo is automatically added by go and you can build a binary of only this file by :
go build -tags foo -o main
These tags can be quite handy. More here
Example from the go source :
// The net package's name resolution is rather complicated.
// There are two main approaches, go and cgo.
// The cgo resolver uses C functions like getaddrinfo.
// The go resolver reads system files directly and
// sends DNS packets directly to servers.
//
// The netgo build tag prefers the go resolver.
// The netcgo build tag prefers the cgo resolver.
One use case is for integration testing. Suppose you have multiple packages in your go project housing its own unit tests and you are prolly running them through go test ./...
Now suppose you want to add integration tests in a separate package at root level but want to differentiate it from the unit tests.
In that cause you can add a integration tag to each of your file under this directory.
For example:
//go:build integration
// +build integration
package integration
import (
"testing"
)
func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
// test something here
}And in your makefile you can run the integration tests separately by using this tag in your go test command.
test.integration:
go test -tags=integration ./integration/Okay back to the main issue. As I was adding this, I lost the intellisense of my init_test.go file.
Turns out gopls(golang’s language server) stops working if build tags are mentioned in .go files.
Apparently, its a known issue. Follow this
I tried installing latest gopls and related tooling versions but that didn’t help.
As mentioned in the above thread, a quick workaround is to edit your editor’s settings file to explicitly add
tags to gopls env flags.
For example(in case of vscode):
"go.toolsEnvVars": {
"GOFLAGS": "-tags=integration"
}Should work for other code editors too. And you can mention multiple tags by separating them by a comma.
Fin.