Starting Spring Boot Application based on maven in "test scope"

Question

i have written a Spring Boot Application which should use H2 during development and mariadb for integration tests and production. For developing i use Visual Studio Code in WSL2 with Java Extensions.

In pom.xml i defined H2 repository as dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.h2database</groupId>
    <artifactId>h2</artifactId>
    <version>1.4.200</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

In VSCode i created the 3 launch configurations "Debug", "Debug (test)" and "Debug (prod)". In the launch.json file i defined 3 different spring profiles for the different database configurations. Here is an example for the "test" configuration:

{
    "type": "java",
    "name": "Debug (test)",
    "request": "launch",
    "mainClass": "de.frickeldave.fleckerlteppich.telemetry.TelemetryApplication",
    "preLaunchTask": "startmariadb",
    "postDebugTask": "stopmariadb",
    "args": "--spring.profiles.active=test"
} 

The problem: When i start my normal "Debug" Configuration in VSCode, i want to use the H2 database. But because of the definition <scope>test</test> the dependency is not loaded and the application fails to connect. It works perfectly, when i remove the "test-scope" declaration (which is not the goal). What can i do do start the Application in test scope, to have H2 available when debugging with VSCode? Is there a start-parameter i can add?

Thanks in advance

Regards Dave

Answer 1

Dependencies of scope test are not available at runtime.

They can only be used for tests that run during the build.