How to ignore ContextRefreshedEvent when SpringBootTest?

Question

I'm struggling to find out how to ignore a class method, which should start a thread when SpringBootApplication is ready, during normal operation:

@EventListener
public void onApplicationEvent(ContextRefreshedEvent event) {

    this.start();
}

in case of testing I do not want such behavior, want to start it from test method. As far as i understand ContextRefreshedEvent is triggered by @SpringBootTest annotation on test class.

Answer 1

For testing the listener itself:

You do not need @SpringBootTest for every test of Spring Boot application (I would argue that you want minimum of such tests actually as they load everything.)

There are other options:

• If you don't need anything from Spring: Unit test the service with Mockito (if it has dependencies you want to mock away).
• Otherwise: Use slices - for example @JsonTest will autoconfigure ObjectMapper and other beans for working with JSON. There's quite a few of them so check documentation if there's any part of application you would like to be autoconfigured for your test.

For excluding the listener from other @SpringBootTest tests:

I see two options:

• Mocking the listener bean away using @MockBeans.

@SpringBootTest
@MockBeans(@MockBean(Listener.class))
public class SomeTest {
  // ...
}

• Executing tests inside a specific profile and mark the listener bean to be included only inside the default profile. (Or not inside the "test" profile.)

@Component
@Profile("default") // OR: @Profile("!test")
public class Listener {
  // ...
}

@SpringBootTest
@ActiveProfiles("test")
public class SomeTest {
  // ...
}

You might need to extract the listener from the existing bean if you need the bean as a dependency for another service though.