How to start and stop mule in maven - testing

Question

I need to start Mule before I run my tests, and stop it when the tests are finished. It is unclear to me how to alter my Maven pom to accomplish this. So far I have the following in my pom:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>exec</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<executable>java</executable>
<arguments>
<argument>-classpath</argument>
<classpath/>
<argument>org.mule.MuleServer</argument>
<argument>-config</argument>
<argument>my-config.xml</argument>
</arguments>
</configuration>
</plugin>
--- Update ---
After some replies below I decided to add some additional details.
I have several unit tests extending Mules FunctionalTestCase class:
public class SomeUnitTest extends FunctionalTestCase
I started writing some new customer acceptance tests using JBehave which are wired to run during mavens "integration-test" phase. These tests cannot succeed without an instance of mule running. The main class that loads and executes the stories already extends the JUnitStories class:
public class MyStories extends JUnitStories
Since I cannot inherit from FunctionalTestCase in this class, I need to look at alternatives to getting mule to run and stop when I need it for these stories.

Answer 1

Why don't you use Mule's FunctionalTestCase instead? It fires up an in-memory Mule and loads up your configs. Not sure what you gain from starting the whole standalone Mule.

Answer 2

You could probably accomplish what you want by leveraging maven's phases. You'd have to define 2 executions. One to start mule and one to stop it. You'd start mule in one of the pre-test phases (maybe something like process-test-classes) and then stat mule after the test phase. It could be pretty tricky, though.
Another possibility is to fire mule up in junit, somewhere like in a BeforeClass setup function. This will probably be much easier. See:
http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc/org/junit/BeforeClass.html
class muleDriver {
#BeforeClass
public static startMule() {
....programmatically initialize Mule....
....You should be able to grab the config files from the classpath....
}
#Test
public void testSomething() {
....Run Some Tests...
}
}
The other question I'd ask is why you'd want to fire up the whole mule framework for tests. I was on a team that did this, and tests ended up taking a tremendous amount of time during builds because they were firing up mule many times throughout the testing cycle (and other teams copied the pattern.)

Answer 3

Try using junit #ClassRule. The side effect is that individual test cases can not be executed any more.
#RunWith(Suite.class)
#Suite.SuiteClasses({MuleFlowTest.class})
public class MuleSuite {
#ClassRule
public static ExternalResource testRule = new ExternalResource() {
#Override
protected void before() throws Throwable {
final String CLI_OPTIONS[] = {"-config", FlowTestUtil.getURI() };
MuleServer server = new MuleServer(CLI_OPTIONS);
server.start(false, true);
mc = server.getMuleContext();
muleServer = server;
};
#Override
protected void after() {
System.out.println("Shutdown");
muleServer.shutdown();
muleServer = null;
}
};
private static MuleServer muleServer;
public static MuleContext mc;
}
public class MuleFlowTest {
#Test
public void flowTest() {
assertNotNull(MuleSuite.mc);
}
}