Howto add another test source folder to Maven and compile it to a separate folder?

Question

I have the default src/test/java folder for our unit tests. A separate folder src/integration/java is available for the integration tests.

I configured the maven-surefire-plugin to execute the unit/integration tests in their respective phases. This works great when the compiled classes are in the correct directory. Unfortunately Maven only supports one test source folder and one test output folder.

With mavens build-helper plugin I could add another test-source folder but the compiled classes will be generated into test-classes but I want to compile the classes from src/integration/java into target/integration-test-classes. Is this possible?

src/test/java > target/test-classes
src/integration/java > target/integration-test-classes

PS: I don't like this exclude/include on package base solution (exclude all **/it/** files from the default test phase, and exclude all **/unit/** from the integration phase.

Answer 1

Based what you've written it sounds like you didn't named your integration tests correctly and you didn't use the maven-failsafe-plugin for your integration tests. Based on the convention of the maven-failsafe-plugin you should name your integration tests like *IT.java. If you named your integration tests appropriately you can handle that with a more or less configuration like this:

<project ...>
  [...]
  <build>
    [...]
     <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.9.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>add-test-source</id>
            <phase>generate-test-sources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>add-test-source</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <sources>
                <source>src/integration/java</source>
              </sources>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
      [...]
  </build>
  [...]
</project>

With the above it's possible to hold the integration tests within the same module. But this will not solve the idea of having the compiled integration tests classes into a separate folder.

Sometimes it's better to have a separate integration test module which contains only the integration tests (which results in having a multi-module build). If you like to leave the conventions of Maven you can try to configure the maven-compiler-plugin to use a different output path (eg. target/integration-tests/classes) which don't think will really work.