While you may start your Spring Boot application very easily from your test (or test suite) itself, it may be desirable to handle that in the build itself.
To make sure that the lifecycle of your Spring Boot application is properly managed around your integration tests, you can use the `start` and `stop` goals, as shown in the following example:
You could also configure a more advanced setup to skip the integration tests when a specific property has been set, see <<integration-tests.examples.skip,the dedicated example>>.
Spring Boot's Parent POM, `spring-boot-starter-parent`, configures Failsafe's `<classesDirectory>` to be `${project.build.outputDirectory}`.
Without this configuration, which causes Failsafe to use the compiled classes rather than the repackaged jar, Failsafe cannot load your application's classes.
If you are not using the parent POM, you should configure Failsafe in the same way, as shown in the following example:
One nice feature of the Spring Boot test integration is that it can allocate a free port for the web application.
When the `start` goal of the plugin is used, the Spring Boot application is started separately, making it difficult to pass the actual port to the integration test itself.
The example below showcases how you could achieve the same feature using the https://www.mojohaus.org/build-helper-maven-plugin[Build Helper Maven Plugin]:
