Testing expected exception on Spring startup

Test that the application context failed to init due the the expected reason using JUnit and Spring, for example due to BeanCreationException.

Problem

When writing full Spring (or Spring Boot) integration tests, you may want to test that the application didn’t start.

Unfortunately JUnit fails as soon as the application context throws an exception not even running the test, so it cannot be tested.

Trivial solution is to move the application initializing inside a @Test method by manually calling the main() or starting via creating the Spring context manually. These solutions are far from ideal, for one, the test annotations are not processed (ex. @SpringBootTest, @ActiveProfile, etc.), also you are rewriting the logic already in Spring.

I have attempted to create some solutions to address these problems here. All of the extends the original Spring Junit runner to add more functionality.

Solutions

• ContextFailsUsingInspector: Using just an annotation to see what exception happened

• ContextFailsUsingInspector: Same as the previous, but using an inspector

• ContextFailsUsingExpectedException: ClassRule ExpectedException to expect for exceptions in @BeforeClass

Limitations

You need at least an empty @Test method, otherwise Junit and Spring will not try to build the context.