Question

Let’s say we have a project that consists of some Eclipse-projects and Spring 3.1, the final result is a WAR-file. We use WTP for development. All the unit tests and integration tests are working (our Maven does this automatically). The project runs in WTP with a local configuration. In other words everything looks as if it is ready to roll.

Now we want to test run that WAR-file with different sets of configuration files for different platforms. The test should only start the context and see if that causes any issues (missing/misspelt property in a property file, too many beans for auto-wiring, …). AFAIK it isn’t necessary to have access to (or it accessible to) the outside world. Basically it should only start the context, close it and continue with the next configuration. If one context fails, the build should break.

How should we do this? Can we do this with Maven? Something external?

EDIT: Forgot to say: We will run our stuff with Tomcat 6.

Answer 1

Sounds like you are talking about integration test.
You should look at the failsafe plug for this:
http://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-failsafe-plugin/usage.html

Using jetty and maven-failsafe-plugin You need to bind one of
jetty:run, jetty:run-exploded or jetty:run-war to the
pre-integration-test phase with deamon set to true, bind
failsafe:integration-test to the integration-test phase, bind
jetty:stop to the post-integration-test phase and finally bind
failsafe:verify to the verify phase. Here is an example:

Another possibility is a selenium test. Selenium tests require the war to be deployed and running before the tests are run. So there are plugins that do all this.
Then you would have a very simple selenium test case that just made a simple http request to the app to see if it was running.

You would use a different profile for each different configuration you wanted to test.