Mocking and Spying Beans

When running tests, it is sometimes necessary to mock certain components within your application context. For example, you may have a facade over some remote service that is unavailable during development. Mocking can also be useful when you want to simulate failures that might be hard to trigger in a real environment.

Spring Boot includes a @MockBean annotation that can be used to define a Mockito mock for a bean inside your ApplicationContext. You can use the annotation to add new beans or replace a single existing bean definition. The annotation can be used directly on test classes, on fields within your test, or on @Configuration classes and fields. When used on a field, the instance of the created mock is also injected. Mock beans are automatically reset after each test method.

If your test uses one of Spring Boot’s test annotations (such as @SpringBootTest), this feature is automatically enabled. To use this feature with a different arrangement, listeners must be explicitly added, as shown in the following example:

Java
Kotlin

import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.MockitoTestExecutionListener;
import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.ResetMocksTestExecutionListener;
import org.springframework.test.context.ContextConfiguration;
import org.springframework.test.context.TestExecutionListeners;

@ContextConfiguration(classes = MyConfig.class)
@TestExecutionListeners({ MockitoTestExecutionListener.class, ResetMocksTestExecutionListener.class })
class MyTests {

	// ...

}

import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.MockitoTestExecutionListener
import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.ResetMocksTestExecutionListener
import org.springframework.test.context.ContextConfiguration
import org.springframework.test.context.TestExecutionListeners

@ContextConfiguration(classes = [MyConfig::class])
@TestExecutionListeners(
	MockitoTestExecutionListener::class,
	ResetMocksTestExecutionListener::class
)
class MyTests {

	// ...

}

The following example replaces an existing RemoteService bean with a mock implementation:

Java
Kotlin

import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.MockBean;

import static org.assertj.core.api.Assertions.assertThat;
import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.given;

@SpringBootTest
class MyTests {

	@Autowired
	private Reverser reverser;

	@MockBean
	private RemoteService remoteService;

	@Test
	void exampleTest() {
		given(this.remoteService.getValue()).willReturn("spring");
		String reverse = this.reverser.getReverseValue(); // Calls injected RemoteService
		assertThat(reverse).isEqualTo("gnirps");
	}

}

import org.assertj.core.api.Assertions.assertThat
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test
import org.mockito.BDDMockito.given
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest
import org.springframework.boot.test.mock.mockito.MockBean

@SpringBootTest
class MyTests(@Autowired val reverser: Reverser, @MockBean val remoteService: RemoteService) {

	@Test
	fun exampleTest() {
		given(remoteService.value).willReturn("spring")
		val reverse = reverser.reverseValue // Calls injected RemoteService
		assertThat(reverse).isEqualTo("gnirps")
	}

}

@MockBean cannot be used to mock the behavior of a bean that is exercised during application context refresh. By the time the test is executed, the application context refresh has completed and it is too late to configure the mocked behavior. We recommend using a @Bean method to create and configure the mock in this situation.

Additionally, you can use @SpyBean to wrap any existing bean with a Mockito spy. See the Javadoc for full details.

CGLib proxies, such as those created for scoped beans, declare the proxied methods as final. This stops Mockito from functioning correctly as it cannot mock or spy on final methods in its default configuration. If you want to mock or spy on such a bean, configure Mockito to use its inline mock maker by adding org.mockito:mockito-inline to your application’s test dependencies. This allows Mockito to mock and spy on final methods.

While Spring’s test framework caches application contexts between tests and reuses a context for tests sharing the same configuration, the use of @MockBean or @SpyBean influences the cache key, which will most likely increase the number of contexts.

If you are using @SpyBean to spy on a bean with @Cacheable methods that refer to parameters by name, your application must be compiled with -parameters. This ensures that the parameter names are available to the caching infrastructure once the bean has been spied upon.

When you are using @SpyBean to spy on a bean that is proxied by Spring, you may need to remove Spring’s proxy in some situations, for example when setting expectations using given or when. Use AopTestUtils.getTargetObject(yourProxiedSpy) to do so.