Compile Tests Without Running Them in Maven

Summary

Usually in maven you compile and run unit tests. However, in rare circumstances, you may want to compile the unit tests without running them. In those cases,use the following maven command line:

mvn compiler:testCompile

Details

In my case, I was working on a multi-module project where I needed a module Y that depended on the tests from module X. (The act that the non-test code depended on tests from another module is a topic for another post.) Normally I would just do a full

mvn clean
install

on module X and be done. However, the unit tests were failing so the test jar wasn't getting installed in the local repository. So to get around this problem, I needed to compile the tests, skip running the tests, and install the resulting JAR. The final command-line was:

mvn compiler:testCompile -DskipTests=true install

Last modified on 19 Oct 2015 by AO