Why does Ginkgo mark skipped specs as failed instead of skipped?

General Discussions
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1

While using Ginkgo for testing in Go, you might notice that when a suite is skipped inside a BeforeSuite, it still counts as a failure in the test summary.

For example:

ginkgo.BeforeSuite(func() {
    if !CheckCondition() {
        ginkgo.Skip("condition not available")
    }
})

When the condition isn’t met, the suite shows this result:

FAIL! -- 0 Passed | 1 Failed | 0 Pending | 0 Skipped

You might expect the skipped suite to be marked as skipped, not failed.

This happens because Skip in BeforeSuite doesn’t apply to individual specs - it affects the entire suite initialization, which Ginkgo interprets as a setup failure, not a skipped spec.

To truly skip tests, consider using BeforeEach with conditional skipping or wrapping your specs with an if check so that the specs themselves are skipped gracefully rather than the suite setup.

2

I ran into the same issue when trying to skip a suite inside BeforeSuite. Turns out, Ginkgo treats anything in BeforeSuite as part of setup - so if it doesn’t complete (even due to Skip), the framework marks it as a failed initialization, not a skipped test.

What worked for me was moving the condition check inside a BeforeEach or wrapping the actual specs with an if !CheckCondition() guard. That way, Ginkgo sees the specs themselves as “skipped,” not the whole suite.

3

From what I’ve seen, this isn’t a bug - it’s how Ginkgo interprets suite-level failures. The BeforeSuite block is expected to prepare the environment. If it doesn’t reach completion, Ginkgo assumes the suite setup failed, so it flags it as FAIL.

If you really need to skip the whole suite conditionally, you can log a message in BeforeSuite and return early, then call Skip inside individual It blocks instead.

4

I had a similar use case where tests depended on an external service. My solution was to check the condition in BeforeSuite, store it in a global variable, and then in each test do something like:

if !envReady {
    ginkgo.Skip("environment not ready")
}

This way, the suite initializes fine, but the specs are individually skipped - and Ginkgo’s summary reports them as skipped instead of failed. Works like a charm!