I am not being sarcastic when I say I want an "Effective Go" for this. If you have examples of high quality tests in an MVC-style service codebase, I would love to see them!
Others have recommended Advanced Testing With Go [1]. I haven't personally watched it, but Mitchell Hashimoto writes clean code.
But if you'd like I'd be happy to take a look at some of the problems you're encountering. I'm @alecthomas on the Gophers Slack or Twitter, feel free to DM me. No guarantees, but it sounds very unusual for an additional test to consume 15 minutes of setup.
"MVC" is at least a half dozen different patterns at this point, and at least one - the one the closeparen is talking about, rendering responses to incoming requests out parts of a data store - is pretty common in Go.
What's different is that the "model" is often e.g. a bare sql.DB and not an object repository, and the "view" is a template called directly by the controller, but "MVC" - even this kind, which isn't the original kind - doesn't have to be an auto-wired DI interface-laden mess. PHP and Java just made it that way.
Maybe it would pay to be more specific, since "MVC" can mean a lot of things. We have requests come into handlers, which map between wire and internal representations. They invoke controllers, which implement the business logic and call gateways and repositories. Repositories wrap storage clients and gateways wrap HTTP or gRPC clients.
Do you not do this? What do you do instead? I guess I can see how testing would be less painful with fewer layers, but at the cost of the production code becoming more entangled.
When I read MVC I guess I take it pretty literally, in that you would have packages named model/s, view/s, and controller/s. That's what I'm speaking to. Of course, abstractly, many programs tend to be structured in some kind of layering scheme that's MVC-ish :)
I don't understand why you would reply with this comment. If the question is "how do I do X?" and X isn't something that you should be doing, why is it not constructive to point that out?
