Running mavenized JUnit Tests from command line

It has been a while again - I was doing lot of work but habit of blogging faded away. Fortunately I started writing things down, specially simple commands that are essential as a tester... Hopefully I will rapidly publish them.

I wasn't a fan of mavenizing java - at least at the start- but it has changed. The thing with these tools is the relative complexity for smaller scale projects. As a tester, I feel this more since we need small and quick JUnit or Java test programs often.

 If the project is mavenized, it is impossible to build the java path manually. You can export the classpath using dependency plugin, and set the classpath. Go to the project folder and give the command,

mvn dependency:build-classpath -Dmdep.outputFile=cp.txt

This will create the file cp.txt with all the dependencies. Now add the output folder of your project, this is usually,

%ProjectDir%\output\classes in a mavenized project. Don’t forget to add the semicolon!

Now open the text file from notepad, press Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C to copy everything. Go to command prompt and type

Set CLASSPATH=

Without pressing Enter, right click the mouse and select paste. That will copy all the contents of the file in to the command. Now press enter and the classpath is set.

To verify, type

echo %CLASSPATH%

This should print all the contents you had in cp.txt. Now run the junit tests with command,

java org.junit.runner.JUnitCore MyTestClass


Alternatively, you can use the command line switch -classpath too but the command line is going to be very long!

java -classpath (content of cp.txt) org.junit.runner.JUnitCore MyTestClass