Disabling Log4J logs during maven test phase

Question

Trace and debug logs can be helpful while doing development in the IDE, but during the build I find those lines quite disturbing, and obfuscating the report printed out by m

Answer 1

As explained by @artbristol (comment on the question) this can be configured in surefire. It can be done in this way in the pom.xml:

        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.5</version>
            <configuration>
                <forkMode>always</forkMode>
                <systemPropertyVariables>
                    <log4j.configuration>file:${basedir}/etc/log4j-silent.properties</log4j.configuration>
                </systemPropertyVariables>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

Then, having the file ${basedir}/etc/log4j-silent.properties with following settings does the trick:

log4j.rootLogger=OFF

The log4j gets completely disabled during test runs in maven, and everything works normally in the IDE.

A better solution would be not to have the additional configuration file; but can't find it so far.

Answer 2

Specify a test log4j configuration file with no appender.

For example if you have a log4j.properties in src/main/resources, then copy it to src/test/resouces and either remove the appender or set the log level to fatal.

Answer 3

Based on the previous answers, I use:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5</version>
    <configuration>
        <forkMode>always</forkMode>
        <argLine>-Dlog4j.configuration=</argLine>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

The Maven output shows a warning about log4j not being initialized, but other than that it seems to work.