Testing an HTTP server with a database backend

An HTTP server is a different kind of animal because it should already run for tests to get executed. Thankfully, the net/http/httptest package can help—you do not need to run the HTTP server on your own as the net/http/httptest package does the work for you, but you need to have the database server up and running. We are going to test the REST API server we have developed in Chapter 10, Working with REST APIs—we are going to copy the server_test.go file with the test code in the https://github.com/mactsouk/rest-api GitHub repository of the server.

To create server_test.go, we do not have to change the implementation of the REST API server.

The code of server_test.go, which holds the test functions for the HTTP service, is the following:

package main
import (
    "bytes"
    "net/http"
    "net/http/httptest"
    "strconv"
    "strings"
    "testing...