Last week I wrote about a minimal Spring Security Context setup for unit testing. I'd like to add just a tiny, yet depending on your use case perhaps quite important, tidbit to that: In case you need to reset a SecurityContext setup, e.g., a mocked user authentication, because, for instance, other test methods from the same unit test class verify behaviour for an unauthenticated application state and hence expect an anonymous user, you can clear the SecurityContext (for example, in your ... Read more

Creating a minimal Spring Security setup for JUnit unit tests can be a tedious as well as somewhat daunting task. With its Authentication, Principal, GrantedAuthority, and UserDetails classes Spring Security is extremely flexible and configurable and probably accommodates pretty much every authentication and authorization use case under the sun. However, in software architecture such flexibility often comes at price, the trade-off in this case being that simple use cases can require more implementation effort than one would expect. One such use case ... Read more