Displaying JUnit Test Reports on GitLab

In this blog post I wanted to look at something interesting that I found a while back this semester when we were learning about JUnit testing and combining this with GitLab. In class we learned how to use Gradle to build our Java programs and to run JUnit tests and get GitLab to run them when we pushed our code to GitLab using GitLab’s continuous integration feature. As GitLab’s documentation says, using Gradle and JUnit on Gitlab will show whether the tests fail on GitLab, but I wanted to take this a step further and looked into seeing if it was possible to display more information about JUnit test statuses on GitLab itself. This led me to finding this article in GitLab’s documentation about a feature in GitLab that can display JUnit test reports on merge requests. As this documentation shows this can easily be enabled on any GitLab project that already is a Java project with GitLab’s CI using Gradle to run JUnit tests. All you need to do is add the necessary lines in the GitLab CI/CD config file provided in this document to display the tests reports in a merge request.

I already tried this before a couple of months ago when I first found it, but I wanted a nice demonstration of this feature, so I created a little Java test program that has a basic Student class with a JUnit test class. I then converted this to a Gradle project using some previous programs we have used as examples and instructions provided from this class and then pushed this to a new GitLab project. On the master branch of this project the tests pass as indicated by the previous GitLab CI job. After getting the initial code pushed and passing the tests, I then created a testing branch where I changed the code in the Student class so that one of the tests (testSetLastName) would deliberately fail. Creating a merge request on GitLab for this branch and pushing this “broken” code results in the test failing when it runs on GitLab with Gradle and therefore GitLab displays on the merge request which JUnit test(s) failed:

I found this little feature to be pretty awesome in combining software testing along with software management tools and can easily see how this would be very useful for checking if new or modified code in a project causes tests to fail. In addition to checking if the tests pass, this feature allows us to easily see which tests fail, and directly on the merge request itself, instead of the alternative that the documentation says of looking through reports possibly containing thousands of lines for the failed test. I will definitely be implementing this on any projects I’m working on that use JUnit tests and are hosted on GitLab.

Link to article: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/junit_test_reports.html

Link to demo program: https://gitlab.com/cradkowski/gitlab-junit-test-reports-demo