I am working on a large multi-module Maven project. Each module has fast unit tests (using the Surefire plugin), many modules have slow integration tests (using the Failsafe plugin).
I would like to speed up the feedback for "simple" build failures (compilation errors and unit test failures) by running integration tests from all modules after all modules have been built and unit-tested.
Can you suggest a good way of achieving this?
running integration tests from all modules after all modules have been built and unit-tested
To meet this requirement a possible solution is to have an additional (optional) module providing integration tests, that is, all integration tests should be moved to this module, which could be added to the default build via a profile.
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>it</id>
<modules>
...
<module>it-module</module>
</modules>
</profile>
</profiles>
In order to have it as last step of the build for the Maven Reactor, this module should also depend on all other modules (probably it would implicitly already be the case).
This module would actually be the only one providing maven-failsafe-plugin configuration and settings. Moreover, it might become more meaningful in case of the usage of an embedded server to test against (i.e. Jetty): the server will be created and shutted down only during the build of this module and not in each and every module requiring it, speeding up this integration phase.
Being the last module of the build, you will make sure that it would be reached only in case of no unit test failures on previous modules and only when the it profile would be active (e.g. during CI builds).
The short answer is probably to move the failsafe-plugin into a profile.
Since maven itself does not come with a default mapping for the failsafe plugin I assume it is enabled in your parent pom or (worse?) the company parent pom.
The way would be to create a profile to enable the integration tests and only enable that profile when needed. To avoid waste this profile could disable the surefire-tests to not re-execute them. If they are fast anyway that might not be an issue. In that case re-execute them for starting.
I think its ok to extract this into a profile. My general rule for maven profiles is that they are not allowed to change the resulting artifact (they can, but it usually gets messy). In this case you add another execution step. So that should not hurt. Just make sure the profile is enabled when cutting a release :)
Here's a solution that does exactly what I want: using the Failsafe plugin to run just the integration tests without having to move tests out of their natural places or recompile in order to run the tests.
mvn install -DskipITs
mvn failsafe:integration-test
We get Maven to publish the artifacts for the project into a local directory. We can then use that as a repository for the second step. In that second step we then invoke exactly the goal that we need and it grabs the artifacts from the local repository.
The same thing works for Surefire (mvn surefire:test) if you need to run unit tests separately.
I have to admit that I don't fully understand the Maven model and hence why this works. The internet seems unanimously of the view that this kind of thing can't be done (see other answers here), but it's definitely working for me.
