I find vanilla Go testing (if res != exp { t.Fatal(...) }) much more versatile than testify. Testify did not cover some of my mocking use cases, and response on the repo was tepid, so I ditched it and was happier (this is a user POV, please don't come bashing me on not contributing to open source, etc.)

For mocks, I use GoMocks (https://github.com/golang/mock), again a "standard" lib of go. It has Expect syntax where you can assert that mocks were called in a certain way.

I use `go generate` to generate my mocks via interfaces. You should be comfortable with abstracting your specific implementation with interfaces. It is like the first must-do step to Go testing, since we cannot monkey patch or duck type stuff on the fly unlike in JS or Ruby... Second step is to generate mocks from the interface, and inject these dependencies into say your API HTTP Handler... Third step is to assert that your mocks were called in a certain way, and you can also craft different return values from your mocks, to test different scenarios. I also extended some of the gomock Matchers to be able to return different stuff on the fly for e.g in the case of row.Scan(&ptrToInt, &ptrToString), etc.

Ultimately I think this is the Golang ethos: Stick to the standard way of doing things, even if you are allergic to it at first. You will be happier.