Unable to execute specific nested test class with Surefire

Question

I have a slight problem with the Surefire plugin.

I have a nested test class hierarchy:

public class NestClassContainer {

    public static class TestClass1 {
        @Test
        public void testC1_m1() {

        }
    }


    public static class TestClass2 {
        @Test
        public void testC2_m1() {

        }
    }

}

My goal is to execute the methods in only one of the nested classes. Unfortunately I am unable to be specific with surefire (Example: only execute testC2_m1() ), even though this is easily possible in both TestNG and in IntelliJ.

I have tried:

mvn clean test -Dtest=NestClassContainer$TestClass2

or even:

mvn clean test -Dtest=com.adobe.campaign.tests.integro.phased.NestClassContainer$TestClass2

I have even tried removing the default excludes in the surefire configuration.

General information:

• Testng 7.5
• Maven 3.8.6
• Surefire : 2.19.1, 2.22.1, 3.0.0-M1
• java 1.8.0_341 JDK

Answer 1

I think this is just a shell escaping problem - are you on a *nix machine (as opposed to Windows)? If so, you need to escape the $, as it marks the start of a variable name.

I've tried your example and it works fine:

mvn test -Dtest=NestClassContainer\$TestClass2

Alternatively, you can put the whole term in single quotes, which disables variable interpolation:

mvn test -Dtest='NestClassContainer$TestClass2'

Both methods show that only the specified nested test is run:

===== Invoked methods
    NestClassContainer$TestClass2.testC2_m1()[pri:0, instance:so73579735.NestClassContainer$TestClass2@6cc7b4de]
=====
[TestNG]
[TestNG] ===============================================
[TestNG]     Surefire test
[TestNG]     Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Skips: []
[TestNG] ===============================================
PASSED: so73579735.NestClassContainer$TestClass2.testC2_m1

===============================================
    Surefire test
    Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Skips: 0
===============================================


===============================================
Surefire suite
Total tests run: 1, Passes: 1, Failures: 0, Skips: 0
===============================================

(For this output, Surefire has to be configured to run testng in verbose mode)

  <build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.0-M1</version> 
            <configuration>
                <properties>
                    <property>
                        <name>surefire.testng.verbose</name>
                        <value>10</value>
                    </property>
                </properties>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

On Windows it works with a plain $, because that character has no special meaning there.