Hello. We are trying to perform automated integration testing in our Maven
build. We have our webapp starting via the Cargo plugin in the
pre-integration-test phase, then stopping in the post-integration-test
phase. This seems like a straightforward application of the Maven
lifecycle. Because our application needs to interact with an external
server and we need to stub this server for the purpose of testing, we need
to be able to start this stub server before Cargo starts and stop the stub
server after Cargo stops. This seems like an extension of the same problem
we're solving with the pre- and post-integration-test phases, but Maven
doesn't seem to support more than one of these pre and post actions in a
logical way (i.e. nesting within one another). Essentially, we'd need
either a nested order of start/stop executions in the pre- and
post-integration-test phases or pre-pre-integration-test and
post-post-integration-test phases into which to add our goals.
Here's what we'd like to happen:
phase pre-integration-test:
stub-server:start
cargo:start
phase post-integration-test:
cargo:stop
stub-server:stop
Initially we thought we might be able to do this by writing our own plugin,
but it appears the goals we specify in an execution will be run in the
order they are configured in the pom. So we get the reverse order we'd
like in the post-integration-test phase:
phase pre-integration-test:
stub-server:start
cargo:start
phase post-integration-test:
stub-server:stop
cargo:stop
This is with plugin definitions like:
<plugin>
<groupId>com.example</groupId>
<artifactId>stubserver-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>start-server</id>
<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>start</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>stop-server</id>
<phase>post-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0.6</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>start-container</id>
<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>start</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>stop-container</id>
<phase>post-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
We've been looking at other ways of doing this, such as using the @execute
annotation, but we haven't found a straightforward way to do it without
hijacking a different phase such as verify or splitting up the
configuration in a way that would be terribly confusing to anyone trying to
understand our build. The only other thing we haven't tried that we can
think of is to redefine DefaultLifecycleMapping entirely to add new phases
for our integration-test module. That seems somewhat invasive, but if it's
a good way to do it, we're willing to go that route.
Does Maven provide a facility for this, or is there a reasonable way to do
it?
Thanks,
Oliver
