Spring Boot Integration Testing with Selenium

Rafal BorowiecMarch 15th, 2015Last Updated: March 12th, 2015

1 3,266 3 minutes read

Web integration tests allow integration testing of Spring Boot application without any mocking. By using @WebIntegrationTest and @SpringApplicationConfiguration we can create tests that loads the application and listen on normal ports. This small addition to Spring Boot makes much easier to create integration tests with Selenium WebDriver.

Test Dependencies

The application that we will be testing is a simple Spring Boot / Thymeleaf application with spring-boot-starter-web, spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf and spring-boot-starter-actuator dependencies. See references for the link to the GitHub project.

The test dependencies are:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.assertj</groupId>
    <artifactId>assertj-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.5.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
    <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
    <version>2.45.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Web Integration Test

With classic Spring Test, using MockMvc, you would create test like below:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = Application.class)
@WebAppConfiguration
public class HomeControllerClassicTest {

    @Autowired
    private WebApplicationContext wac;

    private MockMvc mockMvc;

    @Before
    public void setUp() throws Exception {
        mockMvc = MockMvcBuilders.webAppContextSetup(wac).build();
    }

    @Test
    public void verifiesHomePageLoads() throws Exception {
        mockMvc.perform(MockMvcRequestBuilders.get("/"))
                .andExpect(MockMvcResultMatchers.status().isOk());
    }
}

@SpringApplicationConfiguration extends capabilities of @ContextConfiguration and loads application context for integration test. To create a test without mocked environment we should define our test using @WebIntegrationTest annotation:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = Application.class)
@WebIntegrationTest(value = "server.port=9000")
public class HomeControllerTest {

}

This will start full application within JUnit test, listening on port 9000. Having such test we can easily add Selenium and execute real functional tests using a browser (will not work in headless environment, unless we use HtmlUnit driver – but this is beyond scope of this article).

Adding Selenium

Adding Selenium to the test is very simple, but I wanted to achieve a bit more than that hence I created a custom annotation to mark my tests as Selenium tests. I also configured it the way it allows injecting WebDriver to the test instance:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = Application.class)
@WebIntegrationTest(value = "server.port=9000")
@SeleniumTest(driver = ChromeDriver.class, baseUrl = "http://localhost:9000")
public class HomeControllerTest {

    @Autowired
    private WebDriver driver;

}

@SeleniumTest

@SeleniumTest is a custom annotation:

@Documented
@Inherited
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@TestExecutionListeners(
        listeners = SeleniumTestExecutionListener.class,
        mergeMode = MERGE_WITH_DEFAULTS)
public @interface SeleniumTest {

    Class<? extends WebDriver> driver() default FirefoxDriver.class;

    String baseUrl() default "http://localhost:8080";
}

The annotation uses adds test execution listener that will create a WebDriver instance that can be used in the integration test. TestExecutionListener defines a listener API for reacting to test execution events. It can be used to instrument the tests. Example implementations in Spring Test are used to support test-managed transactions or dependency injection into test instances, for instance.

TestExecutionListener

Note: Some parts of the code of SeleniumTestExecutionListener are skipped for better readability.

SeleniumTestExecutionListener provides way to inject configured WebDriver into test instances. The driver instance will be created only once and the driver used can be simply changed with @SeleniumTest annotation. The most important thing was to register the driver with Bean Factory.

@Override
public void prepareTestInstance(TestContext testContext) throws Exception {
    ApplicationContext context = testContext.getApplicationContext();
    if (context instanceof ConfigurableApplicationContext) {

        SeleniumTest annotation = findAnnotation(
                testContext.getTestClass(), SeleniumTest.class);
        webDriver = BeanUtils.instantiate(annotation.driver());

        // register the bean with bean factory

    }
}

Before each test method base URL of the application will be opened by a WebDriver:

@Override
public void beforeTestMethod(TestContext testContext) throws Exception {
    SeleniumTest annotation = findAnnotation(
            testContext.getTestClass(), SeleniumTest.class);
    webDriver.get(annotation.baseUrl());

}

In addition, on every failure a screenshot will be generated:

@Override
public void afterTestMethod(TestContext testContext) throws Exception {
    if (testContext.getTestException() == null) {
        return;
    }

    File screenshot = ((TakesScreenshot) webDriver).getScreenshotAs(OutputType.FILE);

    // do stuff with the screenshot

}

After each test the driver will be closed:

@Override
public void afterTestClass(TestContext testContext) throws Exception {
    if (webDriver != null) {
        webDriver.quit();
    }
}

This is just an example. Very simple implementation. We could extend the capabilities of the annotation and the listener.

The test

Running the below test will start the Chrome browser and execute some simple checks with Selenium:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = Application.class)
@WebIntegrationTest(value = "server.port=9000")
@SeleniumTest(driver = ChromeDriver.class, baseUrl = "http://localhost:9000")
public class HomeControllerTest {

    @Autowired
    private WebDriver driver;

    private HomePage homePage;

    @Before
    public void setUp() throws Exception {
        homePage = PageFactory.initElements(driver, HomePage.class);
    }

    @Test
    public void containsActuatorLinks() {
        homePage.assertThat()
                .hasActuatorLink("autoconfig", "beans", "configprops", "dump", "env", "health", "info", "metrics", "mappings", "trace")
                .hasNoActuatorLink("shutdown");
    }

    @Test
    public void failingTest() {
        homePage.assertThat()
                .hasNoActuatorLink("autoconfig");
    }
}

The test uses simple page object with custom AssertJ assertions. You can find the full source code in GitHub. See references.

In case of a failure, the screenshot taken by the driver, will be stored in appropriate directory.

Summary

Integration testing of fully loaded Spring Boot application is possible in regular JUnit test thanks to @WebIntegrationTest and @SpringApplicationConfiguration annotations. Having the application running within a test opens a possibility to hire Selenium and run functional tests using the browser. If you combine it with profiles and some more features of Spring Test (e.g. @Sql, @SqlConfig) you may end up with quite powerful yet simple solution for your integration tests.