Question

I made some unit-tests using fest, now I need to run mvn my test using maven on a headless system. I would like to run test using Xvfb but I need help to configure maven to start Xvfb before testing and stop it when all is done.

Answer 1

Actually I use this plugin configuration:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>start-xvfb</id>
            <phase>process-test-classes</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <tasks>
                    <echo message="Starting xvfb ..." />
                    <exec executable="Xvfb" spawn="true">
                        <arg value=":1" />
                    </exec>
                </tasks>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
        <execution>
            <id>shutdown-xvfb</id>
            <phase>test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <tasks>
                    <echo message="Ending xvfb ..." />
                    <exec executable="killall">
                            <arg value="Xvfb" />
                    </exec>
                </tasks>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

The good is that you get a background process (with spawn = "true") and you can kill the Xvfb process (with killall) without having to write any script. Moreover in my Ubuntu distro I don’t hav to set any special setting in my sudoers file to let this works.

The shutdown-xvfb execution is executed at the end of the test phase but (here is the problem) is not executed if the test fail. This is not a problem if you want to restart another test (the old Xvfb is still running and the new one can’t run, but this is not a problem) but the problem is that the resources are still busy by Xvfb. A workaround for this could be to add testFailureIgnore = "true" to the configuration of maven-surefire-plugin but this way I can’t easily see if some test fail.