[JVM] Passing parameters to test suite?

[anar...@gmail.com]

I have a project with Cucumber on Java + Maven and I need to pass a username and password so it can log in to the application under test.
What would be the best way to do this? I really don't like the idea of hard-coding the information.
I was thinking maybe adding them in Maven's pom.xml somewhere, or passing them as arguments when executing the mvn command to run the suite. But I don't know how to do either. Or maybe there's a better way I haven't thought of.

Thanks in advance!

[Aslak Hellesøy]

Use Java system properties or environment variables.

System properties can be passed with -Dfoo=bar and can be accessed with System.getProperty("foo")

How to set environment variables depends on your OS/shell, and can be red from Java with System.getenv("foo")

Aslak

 

Thanks in advance!

[Koen Prins]

Please allow me to expand a bit as I struggled with something similar recently. Your answer is completely correct but I think a small example might not hurt.

The Java system parameters can be set in various ways, this method is using Maven command line. 

Using maven and you do not want to hardcode the username and password (which is smart either way), you can set a system parameter using the `-D` prefix in the maven command. 

The command would then look something like this:

`mvn test -Dusername=anarelle -Dpassword=seCTIaDentIm`

The java code to use this would look a bit like this:

`

public void runTest(){

String username = System.getProperty("username");

String password = System.getProperty("password");

//here is a bit of RestAssured to store the cookie with, there is a similar thing in Selenium that I cannot remember on the spot ;-)

Response response = loginToWebsite(username, password); //this method does the login things with your website to retrieve a cookie

Map<String, String> allCookies = response.getCookies(); //and here you store all the cookies in a map

}

`

The point is of course that you can set a variable that is accessible on *that specific maven run* using the -D prefix and it is super useful for all kinds of things, not just runtime username passwords.

Another way to do all this is with Maven profiles, read up on those as they are similarly super useful.

Final note: no matter what, you will have to store your username/password somewhere in your codebase if you want to do full automation because else you will have to manually type the command every time you want to run the test. The real best reason to use a parameter is so you do not have to touch the code for running a test with a different username or if a password changes.

Good luck!

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