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rakyll/gotest

★ 1,398 · Go · BSD-3-Clause · updated Jan 2026

go test with colors

A drop-in wrapper around `go test` that colorizes pass/fail output. It pipes go test's output through a regex parser and rewrites lines with ANSI colors. Useful if you run tests in a terminal and want faster visual scanning.

Genuinely zero friction to adopt — it's a transparent wrapper, so every flag you pass to `go test` works unchanged. The `GOTEST_PALETTE` env var for customizing colors is a small but thoughtful touch. CI detection that auto-enables colors on Travis, AppVeyor, GitLab, and CircleCI means you don't have to configure it per environment. The codebase is tiny (essentially one file), so there's nothing to go wrong.

This is a solved problem in 2026 — `gotestsum` does this and much more (JUnit output, watch mode, summary formatting), and most teams have already moved to it. The repo is a single `main.go` with no tests of its own, which is a little ironic. No support for `go test -json` output format, so you can't pipe results to other tools cleanly. At 1400 stars and 64 forks over many years, it's more of a personal utility that went public than a maintained project.

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