Binary output and testing for Eclipse plugins

Question

I am developing an Eclipse plugin and I use maven to coordinate my source structure. In order to compile the plugin I use the tycho extension for maven. However, I was wondering how to execute unitests.

I want to use the surefire plugin for testing as I additionally use a sonar server for source code quality management. Unitests are applyed if I use eclipse-test-plugin as package target. However, I want to make use of the default surefire plugin for applying unitests.

Now I figured out that the src/test/java that contains my unittest packages is read and compiled correctly but written into the wrong output folder. I need to have the tests in target/test-classes. However they are compiled to target/classes.

As I am new to Eclipse plugin development and maven I could not find out how to write the tests to the correct output folder. I've already tried adding and and changing the build.properties of the eclipse-plugin project. It works also fine for other projects that aren't plugin projects and do not make use of tycho.

Any help appreciated.

Regards, Florian

Answer 1

Unlike standard maven projects, the convention for eclipse plugins/OSGi bundles is to have tests reside in separate projects. This is because there is no such thing as a maven dependency scope "test" in OSGi. Thus keeping your tests inside the same project as your code under test would force you to mix up test code/dependencies an productive code/dependencies.

As you mentioned, Tycho provides a separate maven packaging type "eclipse-test-plugin" which you should use for dedicated test plugins/fragments. See https://docs.sonatype.org/display/TYCHO/PackagingTypes

There is no support in Tycho for plain unit tests residing in the same project.