JUnit 4: Set up things in a test suite before tests are run (like a test's @BeforeClass method, just for a test suite)

Question

I want to do some functional testing on a (restful) webservice. The testsuite contains a bunch of test cases, each of which performs a couple of HTTP requests on the webservice.

Naturally, the webservice has to run or the tests will fail. :-)

Starting the webservice takes a couple of minutes (it does some heavy data lifting), so I want to start it as infrequently as possible (at least all test cases that only GET resources from the service could share one).

So is there a way to do set up me the bomb in a test suite, before the tests are run like in a @BeforeClass method of a test case?

Answer 1

jUnit can't do that sort of thing -- though TestNG does have @BeforeSuite and @AfterSuite annotations. Normally, you get your build system to do it. In maven, there are the "pre-integration-test" and "post-integration-test" phases. In ANT, well you just add the steps to the task.

Your question is pretty much a dup of Before and After Suite execution hook in jUnit 4.x, so I'd take a look at the suggestions over there.

Answer 2

Look at this previous answer to a similar question. It gives an example of how to implement this behavior.

Answer 3

As an aside, it's a bad idea to have unit tests actually calling external resources like webservices, databases, etc.

Unit tests should be super-quick to run and a delay of 'a couple of minutes' for each run of the suite will mean it won't be run as much as it should.

My advice:

Look at mocking external dependencies in unit tests with something like EasyMock (http://www.easymock.org/).

Build a seperate suite of integration tests with something like Fitnesse (http://fitnesse.org/) or a homegrown solution that runs against a test environment and which is continually up.

Answer 4

One option is to use something like Apache Ant to launch your unit test suite. You can then put a target invocation before and after your junit target to start and stop your webservice:

<target name="start.webservice"><!-- starts the webservice... --></target>
<target name="stop.webservice"><!-- stops the webservice... --></target>
<target name="unit.test"><!-- just runs the tests... --></target>

<target name="run.test.suite" 
        depends="start.webservice, unit.test, stop.webservice"/>

You then run your suite using ant (or your integration tool of choice). Most IDEs have Ant support, and it makes it much easier to move your tests into a continous integration environment (many of which use Ant targets to define their own tests).