Maven: surefire plugin ignores -Dgroups when <groups> is already configured

Question

There are several JUnit tests in my project that I rarely want to run. For this, I put them in @Category , and then I did this:

 <plugin> <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId> <!-- Run all but the inject tests --> <configuration> <groups>!be.test.InjectTests</groups> </configuration> </plugin> 

I would like to redefine the configuration on the command line to run Inject tests as follows:

 mvn clean install -Dgroups=be.test.InjectTests 

But this does not work, -Dgroups are ignored by Maven.

If I don’t, the team works great.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it seems that if something is installed in pom, it is not easy to override (if you set skipTests explicitly, it would be difficult to override the property skipTests ) ... But! (and this is a bit of a hack), you can defer property setting to the pom property and then override it on the command line.

 <project> ... <properties> <groups>!Slow</groups> <properties> .... <build> <plugins> ... <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.13</version> <configuration> <groups>${groups}</groups> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> </build> ... 

With this (and a fast-track project running on OSX, Maven 3.0.4, Java 1.6.0_37):

 $ mvn clean test ... Results : Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0 ... $ mvn clean test -Dgroups=Slow ... Results : Tests run: 3, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0