unit test a servlet with an embedded Jetty

Question

How can we unit test a servlet with an embedded Jetty server?

For example, how to test the servlet method below?

protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest          


        

Answer 1

I vastly prefer testing servlets with an embedded instance of jetty using something like junit to bootstrap it.

http://git.eclipse.org/c/jetty/org.eclipse.jetty.project.git/tree/examples/embedded/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/embedded/MinimalServlets.java

that is the minimal example of how to do it.

This is also how we test the vast majority of jetty itself, starting it up and running it through its paces.

For a specific servlet or handler we often use the jetty-client or a SimpleRequest in our jetty-test-helper artifact. A URLConnection works as well.

http://git.eclipse.org/c/jetty/org.eclipse.jetty.toolchain.git/tree/jetty-test-helper/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/toolchain/test/SimpleRequest.java

Here is a test in the jetty-client, it is for jetty-9 so if you want 7 or 8 then look under the corresponding tag, it was refactored quite a bit in jetty-9.

http://git.eclipse.org/c/jetty/org.eclipse.jetty.project.git/tree/jetty-client/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/client/HttpClientTest.java

Note: I recommend you pass 0 as the port for jetty to start up with and that will give you an random open port which you can then pull out of jetty for testing purposes, this avoids the situation where multiple builds are running on CI or parallel builds where there might be a port conflict.