Can Spring Boot test classes reuse application context for faster test run?

Question

@ContextConfiguration location attribute does not make sense for Spring Boot integration testing. Is there any other way for reusing application context across multiple test classes annotated with @SpringBootTest ?

Solution 1

Yes. Actually it is default behavior. The link point to Spring Framework docs, which is used by Spring Boot under the hood.

BTW, context is reused by default also when @ContextConfiguration is used as well.

Solution 2

For those like me landing from Google:

If you have <reuseFork>false</reuseFork> in your Maven surefire plugin, there is no chance your context can be reused, as you're effectively spawning a new JVM for each test class.

This is well documented in Spring Documentation: https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/testing.html#testcontext-ctx-management-caching

Solution 3

@SpringBootTest(webEnvironment = WebEnvironment.RANDOM_PORT)

The above annotation says the complete context is loaded and same is used across the tests. It means it's loaded once only.

Spring Boot provides a @SpringBootTest annotation which can be used as an alternative to the standard spring-test @ContextConfiguration annotation when you need Spring Boot features. The annotation works by creating the ApplicationContext used in your tests via SpringApplication

Solution 4

If you land here from Google and have an issue with multiple application contexts being started, also take note of this:

Make sure that when you use @SpringBootTests multiple times that you use the same properties. E.g. if you have one test using simply @SpringBootTest and another one using @SpringBootTest(webEnvironment = SpringBootTest.WebEnvironment.RANDOM_PORT) each will spin up its own context!

Easiest would be to have a BaseIntegrationTest class which you extend in every integration test and put the @SpringBootTest annotation on that base class, e.g.:

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;

@SpringBootTest
public abstract class BaseIntegrationTest{
}

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