The Failsafe Plugin is designed to run integration tests while the Surefire Plugins is designed to run unit tests. The name (failsafe) was chosen both because it is a synonym of surefire and because it implies that when it fails, it does so in a safe way.
The Maven lifecycle has four phases for running integration tests:
If you use the Surefire Plugin for running tests, then when you have a test failure, the build will stop at the integration-test phase and your integration test environment will not have been torn down correctly.
The Failsafe Plugin is used during the integration-test and verify phases of the build lifecycle to execute the integration tests of an application. The Failsafe Plugin will not fail the build during the integration-test phase thus enabling the post-integration-test phase to execute.
NOTE: when running integration tests, you should invoke maven with the (shorter to type too)
mvn verify
rather than trying to invoke the integration-test phase directly, as otherwise the post-integration-test phase will not be executed.
The Failsafe Plugin generates reports in 2 different file formats:
By default, these files are generated at ${basedir}/target/failsafe-reports.
For an HTML format of the report, please see the Maven Surefire Report Plugin.
The Failsafe Plugin has only 2 goals:
General instructions on how to use the Failsafe Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below.
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 fill 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.