Allow to not invoke the test aot task with Gradle

[julb]

Dear team,

I was thinking that I could be interesting to have an easy way to disable AOT for unit tests.
Indeed, for example, I'm currently building a Spring cloud function and I haveimplemented unit tests as indicated in Spring Cloud Function docs.
I will package this function with Native, but I don't want to tackle the native part for unit tests, the classic unit tests are fine.

In the gradle plugin, this section enables the aotTest for all tasks of type Test. Wouldn't it be good to do that section for GraalVM nativeTest task only ?

Also, aotMain seems to be run only for nativeCompile task so I think it would make sense to do the same for test.

What do you think ?

[olegz]

But isn't disabling AOT is as simple as setting VM option -DspringAot=false?

[julb]

Hello,
Thanks for your feedback.

I tried with:

test {
    useJUnitPlatform()
    jvmArgs = ["-DspringAot=false"]
}

or using ./gradlew test -DspringAot=false and it has no effect.

The classpath for unit tests and the system properties are still modified by the plugin.

[sdeleuze]

AOT mode for tests is useful for both JVM and native since it allows to ensure that the AOT flavor run fines on JVM (fast feedback loop) before going on native side (slower).

I think for now, AOT generation for test happen unconditionally (IMO not a major issue) and execution of tests in AOT mode (JVM or native) happen if generated test files are detected. I don't think we support -DspringAot=false for executing tests in regular mode but I think that could indeed be a good thing to support it.

For disabling native tests, Gradle Native Build Tools plugin allow to disable native tests via:

graalvmNative {
    testSupport = false
}

Maven Native Build Tools plugin allow to disable native test by removing the test-native execution and will support shortly doing that onthe command line via -DskipNativeTests, see graalvm/native-build-tools#179.

[julb]

Thanks @sdeleuze for this feedback 👍

In the meantime, if someone else is interested by having a workaround, I did this for now in a subprojects block:

afterEvaluate {
  if (project.plugins.hasPlugin('org.springframework.experimental.aot')) {
    generateTestAot.onlyIf { false }
    test.configure { t ->
      t.systemProperties.remove('spring.test.context.default.CacheAwareContextLoaderDelegate')
    }
  }
}

[snicoll]

For the record, this is only a problem with Gradle as far as I can see as Maven has two separate goals and you could decide to include them or not. If I understood correctly, generateTestAot is invoked with no way to disable it with Gradle? I wouldn't put pressure on fixing this but that looks a little odd to me.

IMO, this is also a different issue than having the plugin configured and choosing to run the tests without AOT.

[sdeleuze]

For the record, this is only a problem with Gradle

I am not sure I agree since with Maven test invoke AOT generation and someone could need to execute tests in regular mode without having to modify the pom.xml.

[snicoll]

Yes but that's not the same problem. I understand there is no easy way to not invoke the test aot task with Gradle. IMO it is a more severe limitation than what you've described.

[bclozel]

It is the way it is right now because we initially decided to make it the default.
But we could create a new aotTest task that depends on check.

[sdeleuze]

I renamed this issue to clarify it is about allowing to not invoke the test aot task with Gradle, and created #1356 about providing a way to use regular codepath for test execution.

[haroldlbrown]

For us, disabling AOT in Gradle for tests would also be beneficial.
We use MockBeans in our Spring integration tests. MockBean is currently not supported in AOT.
So disabling AOT would help us in not having to rewrite our Spring integration tests.