How to skip Maven unit test example

In this tutorial we will show you how to avoid running the unit tests of a Maven based Java project. By default, Apache Maven executes all unit tests automatically, when building a project. However, if a single test fails, Maven aborts the building process and reports the encountered errors.

In this example, we use the following tools on a Windows 7 platform:

• Apache Maven 3.1.1
• JDK 1.7
• Maven Surefire Plugin 2.16

 
In any case you don’t want the building procedure to halt because of a unit test failure, Maven is capable of skipping all unit tests and continue with the project building procedure.

In order to skip the unit test execution, we must add the -Dmaven.test.skip=true argument to our command. For example:

mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Alternatively, we can take advantage of the maven-surefire-plugin. The Surefire Plugin is used during the test phase of the build lifecycle to execute the unit tests of an application. In our pom.xml file, we add the following snippet:

<build>
   <plugins>
      <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>2.16</version>
         <configuration>
            <skipTests>true</skipTests>
         </configuration>
      </plugin>
   </plugins>
</build>

In the above snippet we observe that we define skipTests as true. If we rebuild the project, all unit tests will be completely ignored. For example, if we execute the command:

mvn clean install

we shall observe the following message in the command line:

 
This was an example on how to skip all unit tests of a Maven based Java project.