How do you assert that a certain exception is thrown in JUnit 4 tests?
Asked 07 September, 2021
Viewed 1.6K times
  • 63
Votes

How can I use JUnit4 idiomatically to test that some code throws an exception?

While I can certainly do something like this:

@Test
public void testFooThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
  boolean thrown = false;

  try {
    foo.doStuff();
  } catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
    thrown = true;
  }

  assertTrue(thrown);
}

I recall that there is an annotation or an Assert.xyz or something that is far less kludgy and far more in-the-spirit of JUnit for these sorts of situations.

30 Answer