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testing: stream t.Log output as it happens #24929

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brikis98 opened this issue Apr 18, 2018 · 32 comments
Closed

testing: stream t.Log output as it happens #24929

brikis98 opened this issue Apr 18, 2018 · 32 comments

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@brikis98
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brikis98 commented Apr 18, 2018

As suggested in #23213 (comment), I'm filing a new issue with a proposal for how to improve t.Log and t.Logf.

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go version go1.9.2

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

I'm on Darwin, amd64, but this affects all systems/architectures.

Motivation

Consider the following (silly) automated tests:

func TestFoo(t *testing.T) {
	t.Parallel()

	for i := 0; i < 15; i++ {
		t.Logf("%d", i)
		time.Sleep(3 * time.Second)
	}
}

func TestBar(t *testing.T) {
	t.Parallel()

	for i := 0; i < 15; i++ {
		t.Logf("%d", i)
		time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)
	}
}

func TestBaz(t *testing.T) {
	t.Parallel()

	for i := 0; i < 15; i++ {
		t.Logf("%d", i)
		time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
	}
}

If I run go test -v, I get no log output until all of TestFoo is done, then no output until all of TestBar is done, and again no more output until all of TestBaz is done. This is fine if the tests are working, but if there is some sort of bug, there are a few cases where buffering log output is problematic:

  • When iterating locally, I want to be able to make a change, run my tests, see what's happening in the logs immediately to understand what's going on, hit CTRL+C to shut the test down early if necessary, make another change, re-run the tests, and so on. If TestFoo is slow (e.g., it's an integration test), I get no log output until the very end of the test. This significantly slows down iteration.
  • If TestFoo has a bug that causes it to hang and never complete, I'd get no log output whatsoever. In these cases, t.Log and t.Logf are of no use at all. This makes debugging very difficult.
  • Moreover, not only do I get no log output, but if the test hangs too long, either the Go test timeout kills the test after 10 minutes, or if I increase that timeout, many CI servers will also kill off tests if there is no log output after a certain amount of time (e.g., 10 minutes in CircleCI). So now my tests are killed and I have nothing in the logs to tell me what happened.

Current workarounds

The main workaround is to replace all t.Logf calls with either fmt.Printf or a custom logger. Since we often want to iterate quickly on tests, and since debugging is such an important use case, in practice, that means we never use t.Logf at all.

This seems like a missed opportunity. Go has a lot of powerful testing tools built in, and we usually pass the t variable around to many test methods so they can call t.Fatal(), t.Name(), etc. It would be great if t had a logger built in that we could actually use. Honestly, the only thing it's really missing is some way to configure the logger to write to stdout immediately, rather than buffering.

Possible solutions

Probably the easiest way to improve t.Log and t.Logf is to add a -test.streamlogs option to the go test command. When this option is set, t.Log and t.Logf write to stdout immediately, instead of buffering.

This means the output format with this option set wouldn't be backwards compatible, but the expectation is that this option would only be used for local debugging, and not something used in your CI system.

@randall77
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I think we can modify -v to get what you want. For instance:

--- a/src/testing/testing.go
+++ b/src/testing/testing.go
@@ -560,6 +560,10 @@ func (c *common) FailNow() {
 func (c *common) log(s string) {
        c.mu.Lock()
        defer c.mu.Unlock()
+       if c.chatty {
+               fmt.Printf("%s: %s", c.name, c.decorate(s))
+               return
+       }
        c.output = append(c.output, c.decorate(s)...)
 }

This will print output immediately, and you get something like this:

$ go test -v
=== RUN   TestFoo
=== PAUSE TestFoo
=== RUN   TestBar
=== PAUSE TestBar
=== RUN   TestBaz
=== PAUSE TestBaz
=== CONT  TestFoo
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 0
=== CONT  TestBaz
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 0
=== CONT  TestBar
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 0
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 1
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 1
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 2
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 1
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 3
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 2
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 4
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 5
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 3
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 2
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 6
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 7
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 4
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 8
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 3
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 9
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 5
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 10
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 11
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 6
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 4
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 12
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 13
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 7
TestBaz: 	test_test.go:30: 14
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 5
--- PASS: TestBaz (15.01s)
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 8
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 9
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 6
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 10
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 7
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 11
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 8
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 12
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 13
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 9
TestBar: 	test_test.go:21: 14
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 10
--- PASS: TestBar (30.01s)
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 11
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 12
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 13
TestFoo: 	test_test.go:12: 14
--- PASS: TestFoo (45.02s)
PASS
ok  	_/Users/khr/gowork/issue24929	45.019s

It's pretty jumbled, but gets you what you want.
I don't think there's any issue with changing the format of -v output.

@brikis98
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That would be great 👍

I agree the output is jumbled, but it's actually surprisingly easy to follow so long as each line is prefixed with the test name, and if it's very grep-friendly to make things even easier to read.

@agnivade
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Yea, this is totally OK. Usually, I run that single test when debugging a test. So I don't need to bother about other outputs getting jumbled. I just want the log output to appear immediately.

@rsc rsc changed the title Proposal: add support for streaming logs from t.Log as they happen, rather than buffering until the end of the test proposal: log: stream t.Log output as it happens Apr 23, 2018
@rsc rsc changed the title proposal: log: stream t.Log output as it happens proposal: testing: stream t.Log output as it happens Apr 23, 2018
@rsc
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rsc commented Apr 23, 2018

I'm skeptical that we can modify -v output, for what little that's worth.

@brikis98
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brikis98 commented Apr 26, 2018

One more note on the topic of log streaming. It seems that if you run go test against multiple packages (e.g., go test -v ./...), the log output is buffered, and using fmt.Println or any other utility that writes to stdout does not help in this instance. I'm not sure on the buffering logic, but it seems like no log output shows up until all the tests in an entire package are done, and the log output is displayed one package at a time.

This leads to all the same issues mentioned above, and is especially problematic if you have a single slow package (e.g., one with integration tests), as many CI systems will kill your tests after a certain timeout with no log output (e.g., 10 min in CircleCI). Changing your code doesn't help in this case. The only workaround I've found is to set -p 1, so each package is tested sequentially. This seems to allow fmt.Println to stream to stdout as normal, but significantly reduces the parallelism you can get in your tests.

@ianlancetaylor
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We could argue that the output of -test.v is intended for human consumption, and as such is OK to change along the lines that @randall77 suggests above. Programs that want to parse test output should use -test.json. Of course, this means that we might need to modify the -test.json output in some way so that the test2json program can parse the new output.

@rsc
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rsc commented May 7, 2018

The redefinition of -v is a bit concerning to me but maybe not enough to sink the idea.
Let's land this early in the Go 1.12 cycle, along with changes to test2json to parse the new prefixes.
If it turns out to be bad, we'll have time to roll it back.

@rsc rsc changed the title proposal: testing: stream t.Log output as it happens testing: stream t.Log output as it happens May 7, 2018
@rsc rsc modified the milestones: Proposal, Go1.12 May 7, 2018
@jeanbza
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jeanbza commented Jun 4, 2018

Is anyone working on an impl? If not, I'll try something this weekend.

zegl added a commit to zegl/go that referenced this issue Jul 8, 2018
Stream output of t.Log in tests via fmt.Printf if -test.v is set

Fixes golang#24929
@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/122581 mentions this issue: testing: stream t.Log output as it happens

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/127120 mentions this issue: testing: -v flag streams logs

@AkihiroSuda
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What's current status?

@jeanbza
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jeanbza commented Oct 29, 2018

Still waiting on for it to be able to make it into Go1.12, I think. @ianlancetaylor is that still some time off? Sorry, I'm not super aware of the timeline.

Also I need to rebase, but I'll hold off until it's feasible for it to make it in.

@ianlancetaylor
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Timeline is at https://golang.org/wiki/Go-Release-Cycle .

The changes now have merge conflicts. Can you resolve those? Thanks.

@jeanbza
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jeanbza commented Nov 1, 2018

Done - will continue conv in gerrit.

@cybrcodr
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We have a wrapper code that parses the output, and I had to rework that in order to account for this change.

I do have a concern with the legibility of the output especially when running multiple tests and subtests. Here's a simple example --

=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails
    TestNestedSubtestFails: multilevelsubtest_test.go:11: TestNestedSubtestFails -- level 1
         new line here
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1
    TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1: multilevelsubtest_test.go:13: subtest1 -- level 2
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1
    TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1: multilevelsubtest_test.go:15: subtest1-1 -- level 3
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1/subtest1-1-1
    TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1/subtest1-1-1: multilevelsubtest_test.go:17: failed
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-1
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-2
=== RUN   TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest2
    TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest2: multilevelsubtest_test.go:26: subtest2 -- level 2
    TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest2: multilevelsubtest_test.go:27: I have a nephew/niece node!
--- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails (0.00s)
    --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1 (0.00s)
        --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1 (0.00s)
            --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1/subtest1-1-1 (0.00s)
        --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2 (0.00s)
            --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-1 (0.00s)
            --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-2 (0.00s)
    --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest2 (0.00s)
FAIL

Imagine if there are more tests/subtests that are running in parallel. I understand the original request, but I wish that was done as an optional flag instead of being the default with no way to opt out.

Anyways, I'd like to know though if given the current implementation, is it possible for log lines to show up in between result lines, e.g.

--- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails (0.00s)
    TestFoo: foo_test.go:11: log line from foo
    --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1 (0.00s)
        --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1 (0.00s)
            --- FAIL: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-1/subtest1-1-1 (0.00s)
        --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2 (0.00s)
            --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-1 (0.00s)
    TestFoo: foo_test:go:20: another log line from foo
            --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest1/subtest1-2/subtest1-2-2 (0.00s)
    --- PASS: TestNestedSubtestFails/subtest2 (0.00s)

??

@ianlancetaylor
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Using an optional flag would just be another knob, and it shouldn't be necessary. People who want something like the old output should be able to run the current output through sed. (I'm not saying the current output is clearly better, I'm just saying that I don't think another knob is the right approach.)

I don't think the testing package will ever display t.Log output between result lines, but I believe that it can display data written to standard output between result lines.

@cybrcodr
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Thanks for the response.

It won't be a simple sed to do exact match for all cases:)

Having standard out between result lines can mess up parsing if the output produces fake result lines. Anyways, it's probably not likely.

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/219540 mentions this issue: testing: remove obsolete comment in testing.(*T) docs

gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Feb 15, 2020
We now only accumulate logs when not using -v. Just drop the sentence
entirely rather than try to describe the current situation.

Updates #24929
Updates #37203

Change-Id: Ie3bf37894ab68b5b129eff54637893c7a129da03
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/219540
Run-TryBot: Ian Lance Taylor <iant@golang.org>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@golang.org>
@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/226757 mentions this issue: test2json: associate streaming log output with the originating test

@ianlancetaylor
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See #38458, which suggests changing the format again.

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/232157 mentions this issue: testing: reformat test chatty output

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/229085 mentions this issue: testing: reformat test chatty output

gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue May 21, 2020
In #24929, we decided to stream chatty test output. It looks like,

foo_test.go:138: TestFoo/sub-1: hello from subtest 1
foo_test.go:138: TestFoo/sub-2: hello from subtest 2

In this CL, we refactor the output to be grouped by === CONT lines, preserving
the old test-file-before-log-line behavior:

=== CONT TestFoo/sub-1
    foo_test.go:138 hello from subtest 1
=== CONT TestFoo/sub-2
    foo_test.go:138 hello from subtest 2

This should remove a layer of verbosity from tests, and make it easier to group
together related lines. It also returns to a more familiar format (the
pre-streaming format), whilst still preserving the streaming feature.

Fixes #38458

Change-Id: Iaef94c580d69cdd541b2ef055aa004f50d72d078
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/229085
Run-TryBot: Emmanuel Odeke <emm.odeke@gmail.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Bonventre <andybons@golang.org>
@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/241660 mentions this issue: doc/go1.15: add line for testing streaming change

gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jul 9, 2020
Updates #37419.
Updates #38458.
Updates #24929.

Change-Id: I793bb20fa9db4432fc3a5b69956b7108e4695081
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/241660
Run-TryBot: Jean de Klerk <deklerk@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Dmitri Shuralyov <dmitshur@golang.org>
@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/242057 mentions this issue: [release-branch.go1.14] testing: reformat test chatty output

gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jul 16, 2020
In #24929, we decided to stream chatty test output. It looks like,

foo_test.go:138: TestFoo/sub-1: hello from subtest 1
foo_test.go:138: TestFoo/sub-2: hello from subtest 2

In this CL, we refactor the output to be grouped by === CONT lines, preserving
the old test-file-before-log-line behavior:

=== CONT TestFoo/sub-1
    foo_test.go:138 hello from subtest 1
=== CONT TestFoo/sub-2
    foo_test.go:138 hello from subtest 2

This should remove a layer of verbosity from tests, and make it easier to group
together related lines. It also returns to a more familiar format (the
pre-streaming format), whilst still preserving the streaming feature.

Updates #38458.
Fixes #39308.

Change-Id: Iaef94c580d69cdd541b2ef055aa004f50d72d078
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/229085
Run-TryBot: Emmanuel Odeke <emm.odeke@gmail.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Bonventre <andybons@golang.org>
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/242057
Reviewed-by: Jean de Klerk <deklerk@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Emmanuel Odeke <emm.odeke@gmail.com>
Run-TryBot: Jean de Klerk <deklerk@google.com>
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