Requirements: Maven 3.x and JDK 1.7 or higher. Due to wrong formatting of console text messages in Maven Version prior to 3.1.0 it is highly recommended to use Maven 3.1.0 or higher.
The Surefire Plugin is used during the test phase of the build lifecycle to execute the unit tests of an application. It generates reports in two different file formats:
By default, these files are generated in ${basedir}/target/surefire-reports/TEST-*.xml.
The schema for the Surefire XML reports is available at Surefire XML Report Schema.
The XML reports generated by legacy plugins (versions up to 2.22.0) should be validated by Legacy Surefire XML Report Schema.
Two plugin versions (2.22.1 and 3.0.0-M1) however generate 3.0 XML reports they still refer to legacy schema (see noNamespaceSchemaLocation in XML Report). The projects which expect XML Reports validated by XSD Schema, tools e.g xUnit, should not use versions 2.22.1 and 3.0.0-M1 of the Surefire plugin.
For an HTML format of the report, please see the Maven Surefire Report Plugin.
The Surefire Plugin has only one goal:
General instructions on how to use the Surefire Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples listed below. Last but not least, users occasionally contribute additional examples, tips or errata to the plugin's wiki page. In case you still have questions regarding the plugin's usage, please have a look at the FAQ and feel free to contact the user mailing list. The posts to the mailing list are archived and could already contain the answer to your question as part of an older thread. Hence, it is also worth browsing/searching the mail archive.
If you feel like the plugin is missing a feature or has a defect, you can file a feature request or bug report in our issue tracker. When creating a new issue, please provide a comprehensive description of your concern. Especially for fixing bugs it is crucial that the developers can reproduce your problem. For this reason, entire debug logs, POMs or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven.
The following examples show how to use the Surefire Plugin in more advanced use cases:
