Use custom test script instead of the go binary

[Yekut]

In our current project, there are a bunch of setup commands that needs to be run before running tests, so we wrap them in a setup script that ends with go test. There doesn't seem to be support for this workflow in vscode-go (happy to be pointed out wrong) - is it something worth considering?

A few extra comments:

1. The script is more than just environment variables (which it seems can be setup) - it also has codegen and other stuff in it.
2. If this feature request is too fringe, we might be able to set things up so we can run codegen separately and support the env vars through the existing config - however, the env vars are stored in an env file - not sure if there's a nice way to support that? Happy to open another issue - if this issue is valid then this point is moot anyway.

(Also would be happy to try to provide a patch if this is something worth doing!)

[wtask]

You may to use make or similar tool to prepare your environment, build containers, start tests and so on. Of course, you can open a terminal window and start your workflow from VSCode. For my opinion this is enough in 100% cases. Otherwise use monsters like IDEA.

[Yekut]

@wtask - thanks for the suggestions - they are pretty much all in our toolbox now. I looked through the source code and figured this wouldn't be a hard thing to add, and IDEA does mean ~600 USD per developer. I would be a bit surprised if the VSCode team's response is "go use GoLand" :-) But if that's the case I'll respect the decision.

[ramya-rao-a]

@Yekut Have you considered using tasks for your scenario?

Regarding the question on env file, there is a setting go.testEnvFile that you can use to provide the path to the env file to use when running tests

[Yekut]

@ramya-rao-a That's a good point, thanks! Didn't know tasks exist at all - was only looking at vscode-go and forgot about core vscode features. I'll try it and see if it works out, thanks!

[Yekut]

So I've been trying this out and it seems there's no way to hook this up with vscode-go's coverage tool since it loads the cover file from a tmp dir (unless we can configure the cover file location?) :-( Other than that this seems like it would work. I'll look into it more and if I get it to work will close this out.

[ramya-rao-a]

#1596 tracks the need to configure the test coverage feature to use an existing cover file, so may be that can help?

[ramya-rao-a]

Closing this issue as there is no action item at present other than what #1596 is tracking.
There is PR associated with it, so that feature might come along in the next update or the one after that. So, please subscribe to #1596 to get notified of the progress