Sometimes it's nice to do integration tests when for talking to chef. The net/http package does these end-to-end tests in places like src/pkg/net/http/client_test.go:70.
It would be lovely to have a one-liner to spin up goiardi from code with something less dirty than exec.Command(). Obviously it wouldn't need real persistence or TLS or perhaps even signal handling.
(This is all part of my grand scheme to get discoteq, chef-golang and goiardi into debian unstable.)