Spring REST Docs maven continuous build?

Question

I was going through this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ncCJBarRI&t=1443s

Around 1:07:30 the author mentioned about "Gradle has continuous build" later on was able to detect changes in the test and automatically regenerate asciidoc. I was wondering if anyone knows how to set this up in maven?

I have looked through docs in spring and asciidoctor plugin, but was not able to find anything related to this.

I was able to get maven to re-render html when ever there is a change in index.adoc by changing <goal> from process-asciidoc to auto-refresh. However, this does not watch the change in the Test.

Question

Is there a way to tell Maven to watch our test files and re-compile when changes are made?

POM.XML

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.asciidoctor</groupId>
    <artifactId>asciidoctor-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.5.7.1</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>generate-docs</id>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>auto-refresh</goal>
            </goals>

            <configuration>
                <sourceDocumentName>index.adoc</sourceDocumentName>
            <backend>html</backend>
            <attributes>
                <snippets>${project.build.directory}/generated-snippets</snippets>
            </attributes>
            </configuration>

        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is not a continuous build solution but it works similarly. However, the process does take some time because it essentially re-packages the project everytime there is a change... May not be ideal for some use cases...

I found a plugin that watches files. https://github.com/fizzed/maven-plugins Change the watch directory to where your test files. Changed the goal from compile to package.

Watcher will execute mvnw: package when a change is detected. Then the asciidoctor maven plugin will re-package the project.

Add this to your plugin

<plugin>
            <groupId>com.fizzed</groupId>
            <artifactId>fizzed-watcher-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.6</version>
            <configuration>
                <touchFile>target/classes/watcher.txt</touchFile>
                <watches>
                    <watch>
                        <directory><directory>src/test/[your test package]</directory></directory>
                    </watch>
                </watches>
                <goals>
                    <goal>package</goal>
                    <!-- <goal>compile</goal> -->
                </goals>
                <profiles>
                    <profile>optional-profile-to-activate</profile>
                </profiles>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

Answer 2

Maven does not have an equivalent of Gradle's continuous build. If you want changes in the tests to be detected and to trigger recompilation of the tests and execution of all of the tasks that depend (directly or indirectly) on the compiled test classes, you'll have to use Gradle.