Testing Expected Exceptions with JUnit 5

This post shows how to test for expected exceptions using JUnit 5. If you're still on JUnit 4, please check out my previous post.

Let's start with the following class that we wish to test:

public class Person {
  private final String name;
  private final int age;
    
  /**
   * Creates a person with the specified name and age.
   *
   * @param name the name
   * @param age the age
   * @throws IllegalArgumentException if the age is not greater than zero
   */
  public Person(String name, int age) {
    this.name = name;
    this.age = age;
    if (age <= 0) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid age:" + age);
    }
  }
}

To test that an IllegalArgumentException is thrown if the age of the person is less than zero, you should use JUnit 5's assertThrows as shown below:

import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.*;
import static org.hamcrest.MatcherAssert.*;
import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.*;

import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;

class PersonTest {

  @Test
  void testExpectedException() {
    assertThrows(IllegalArgumentException.class, () -> {
      new Person("Joe", -1);
    });
  }

  @Test
  void testExpectedExceptionMessage() {
    final Exception e = assertThrows(IllegalArgumentException.class, () -> {
      new Person("Joe", -1);
    });
    assertThat(e.getMessage(), containsString("Invalid age"));
  }
}

Related post: Testing Expected Exceptions with JUnit 4 Rules