Spring-boot default profile for integration tests

Come 2021 and Spring Boot 2.4 the solution I have found is to have 3 properties files

• src/main/resources/application.yml – contains the application’s default props
• src/test/resources/application.yml – sets the profile to ‘test’, and imports properties from ‘main’
• src/test/resources/application-test.yml – contains test-specific profiles, which will override ‘main’

Here is the content of src/test/resources/application.yml:

# for testing, set default profile to 'test'
spring.profiles.active: "test"
# and import the 'main' properties
spring.config.import: file:src/main/resources/application.yml

For example, if src/main/resources/application.yml has the content

ip-address: "10.7.0.1"
username: admin

and src/test/resources/application-test.yml has

ip-address: "999.999.999.999"
run-integration-test: true

Then (assuming there are no other profiles)…

when running tests,

profiles=test
--
ip-address=999.999.999.999
username=admin
run-integration-test=true

and when running the application normally

profiles=none
--
ip-address=10.7.0.1
username=admin
run-integration-test <undefined>

Note: if src/main/resources/application.yml contains spring.profiles.active: "dev", then this won’t be overwritten by src/test/resources/application-test.yml

You can put your test specific properties into src/test/resources/config/application.properties.

The properties defined in this file will override those defined in src/main/resources/application.properties during testing.

For more information on why this works have a look at Spring Boots docs.

Another way to do this is to define a base (abstract) test class that your actual test classes will extend :

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest()
@ActiveProfiles("staging")
public abstract class BaseIntegrationTest {
}

Concrete test :

public class SampleSearchServiceTest extends BaseIntegrationTest{

    @Inject
    private SampleSearchService service;

    @Test
    public void shouldInjectService(){
        assertThat(this.service).isNotNull();
    }
} 

This allows you to extract more than just the @ActiveProfiles annotation. You could also imagine more specialised base classes for different kinds of integration tests, e.g. data access layer vs service layer, or for functional specialties (common @Before or @After methods etc).

As far as I know there is nothing directly addressing your request – but I can suggest a proposal that could help:

You could use your own test annotation that is a meta annotation comprising @SpringBootTest and @ActiveProfiles("test"). So you still need the dedicated profile but avoid scattering the profile definition across all your test.

This annotation will default to the profile test and you can override the profile using the meta annotation.

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@SpringBootTest
@ActiveProfiles
public @interface MyApplicationTest {
  @AliasFor(annotation = ActiveProfiles.class, attribute = "profiles") String[] activeProfiles() default {"test"};
}