Go infrastructure

waitfor

A modular Go toolkit for waiting until remote resources and dependent services become available.

Period
Since 2021
Status
maintained
Home
go-waitfor
Role
Creator and maintainer
Stack
Go · Testing · Retry and backoff · Service coordination

What it is

waitfor is a Go library for testing whether remote resources are available and waiting until their checks succeed. The core coordinates checks; separate packages provide support for particular resource types.

It fits integration tests, startup coordination, and other places where a dependent service may become ready after the process asking for it.

Waiting is a control-flow problem

A useful wait operation needs more than a loop and a sleep. It must stop when its context is cancelled, define how checks are retried, make failure observable, and avoid forcing every resource to implement that machinery independently.

waitfor provides that common control flow, including retry and backoff behavior, while resource packages concentrate on testing their own protocols.

Composition at two levels

Checks are modular and can be run concurrently. Callers can assemble the dependencies that matter to one environment without coupling unrelated services or importing a single package containing every integration.

The separate resource modules keep dependency boundaries visible—a small architectural choice that matters in infrastructure code.

What it illustrates

The package turns a familiar piece of operational glue into a bounded abstraction: explicit cancellation, predictable retry behavior, and focused extensions rather than ad hoc readiness loops.