Maven Failsafe Plugin: how to use the pre- and post-integration-test phases

Question

It is not completely clear to me how to best use the Maven Failsafe plugin for integration tests. My use case would be to test SQL queries against a local MySQL database.

I understand that the database should be started during the pre-integration-test phase, and shut down during the post-integration-test. But how do I specify that? Is there a command line I should put in my pom.xml? Or a method that I should annotate with a specific annotation?

Answer 1

In the regular built-in maven lifecycles (jar, war...) the pre-integration-test and post-integration-test test phases are not bound to any maven plugin (ie. the default behavior of these phases is "do nothing"). If you want to setup and populate a database for the tests executed in the integration-test phase you need to bind a maven plugin doing that job to these phases.

The SQL maven plugin executes SQL script in a maven build. The configuration to bind this plugin to the pre/post-integration-phase is pretty straightforward:

In the build>plugins section of the pom.xml file, add the sql-maven-plugin

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>sql-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.5</version>
    <dependencies>
      <!-- include the JDBC driver dependency here -->
      <dependency>
        <groupId>...</groupId>
        <artifactId>...</artifactId>
        <version>...</version>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <!-- common plugin configuration -->
    <configuration>
      <driver>...</driver>
      <url>...</url>
      <username>...</username>
      <password>...</password>
      <!-- other parameters -->
    </configuration>

    <!-- the executions section binds the phases with some plugin goals and optional additional configuration parameters -->
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
        <goals>
          <goal>execute</goal>
        </goals>
        <!-- specific configuration for this execution -->
        <configuration>
          <!-- Include here the SQL scripts to create the DB, inject some test data -->
        </configuration>
      </execution>
      <execution>
        <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
        <goals>
          <goal>execute</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
          <!-- Include here the SQL scripts to drop the database -->
        </configuration>
      </execution>
      [...]
    </executions>
  </plugin>

That should do the trick.