I seem to have the same problem as in http://www.mail-archive.com/cactus-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg05465.html
plus maybe a different variation. The problem as stated in the old message seems to persist. This is on 1.8.1 What happens is the following a) When running several instances of ServletTestRunner they will share one cactus.contextURL. There seems to be no way to make them use different urls. b) We use some tests also on production systems (integrity tests). The UI will be invoked using an https url (SSL!) but cactus computes a http (no SSL!) URL as contextURL. That would be acceptable, if it would use localhost for that but ServletTestRunner does System.setProperty( BaseConfiguration.CACTUS_CONTEXT_URL_PROPERTY, "http://" + theRequest.getServerName() + ":" + theRequest.getServerPort() + theRequest.getContextPath()); and hence uses the external name. It would be great, if 1. cactus.contextURL could be set as a servlet init param (avoiding the system property problems alltogether) 2. ServletTestRunner could be configured to not create an HTTP request at all but rather invoke the test cases directly. Thanks, Henning