How Do You Assert That a Certain Exception Is Thrown in Junit 4 Tests?

Edit: Now that JUnit 5 and JUnit 4.13 have been released, the best option would be to use Assertions.assertThrows() (for JUnit 5) and Assert.assertThrows() (for JUnit 4.13+). See my other answer for details.

If you haven't migrated to JUnit 5, but can use JUnit 4.7, you can use the ExpectedException Rule:

public class FooTest {
  @Rule
  public final ExpectedException exception = ExpectedException.none();

  @Test
  public void doStuffThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
    Foo foo = new Foo();

    exception.expect(IndexOutOfBoundsException.class);
    foo.doStuff();
  }
}

This is much better than @Test(expected=IndexOutOfBoundsException.class) because the test will fail if IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown before foo.doStuff()

See this article for details.

Be careful using expected exception, because it only asserts that the method threw that exception, not a particular line of code in the test.

I tend to use this for testing parameter validation, because such methods are usually very simple, but more complex tests might better be served with:

try {
    methodThatShouldThrow();
    fail( "My method didn't throw when I expected it to" );
} catch (MyException expectedException) {
}

Apply judgement.

As answered before, there are many ways of dealing with exceptions in JUnit. But with Java 8 there is another one: using Lambda Expressions. With Lambda Expressions we can achieve a syntax like this:

@Test
public void verifiesTypeAndMessage() {
    assertThrown(new DummyService()::someMethod)
            .isInstanceOf(RuntimeException.class)
            .hasMessage("Runtime exception occurred")
            .hasMessageStartingWith("Runtime")
            .hasMessageEndingWith("occurred")
            .hasMessageContaining("exception")
            .hasNoCause();
}

assertThrown accepts a functional interface, whose instances can be created with lambda expressions, method references, or constructor references. assertThrown accepting that interface will expect and be ready to handle an exception.

This is relatively simple yet powerful technique.

Have a look at this blog post describing this technique:

The source code can be found here:

Disclosure: I am the author of the blog and the project.

in junit, there are four ways to test exception.

junit5.x

• for junit5.x, you can use assertThrows as following

  @Test
  public void testFooThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
      Throwable exception = assertThrows(IndexOutOfBoundsException.class, () -> foo.doStuff());
      assertEquals("expected messages", exception.getMessage());
  }