The solution is to use -D«project path».test.single to target a specific project.

Should we close this? It's a pretty poor behaviour, that we want to fix at some point.

I think you're right. I haven't been able to come up with any good ideas to this point though.

The best I've come up with is stopping command line system properties from propagating to the buildSrc build. I think you could make a case for this as the buildSrc build probably shouldn't be environmentally sensitive, but this still feels a bit drastic.

Assigning to m4 and downgrading to minor as there is a usable workaround in -D«target project path»:«test task name».single=«test»

So given a project named “thing” and a test task named “test”, this would be…

gradle -D:thing:test.single=«class name»

Please update the user guide with a reference to the workaround (at least until this issue is not fixed): I've struggled some hours to understand how to get selective tests running fine.

1.10 will have a new mechanism that will supersede this. We'll probably remove this method from the docs. Thanks for the reminder.

In the meantime I've attached into gradle_test_single.zip a reproducible test case for a side effect that I've not seen reported into this issue: when there are sources into the buildSrc folder of a multiproject root, then launching sub-projects tests with the -Dsingle.test property always fails (at least with gradle 1.9).

i.e.

./gradlew -Dtest.single=foo/ prj1:test

fails complaining Could not find matching test for pattern: foo/, while if you rename buildSrc to buildSrc.bak it works. However

./gradlew -Dprj1.test.single=foo/ prj1:test

always works

I've just updated gradle_test_single.zip with additional tests under the prj1 baz package, in order to demonstrate that running

./gradlew -Dprj1.test.single=foo/ :prj1:test

the foo pattern does not prevent tests under the baz package to be run.
I could be wrong, but at this point I find no ways to run only a subset of tests under a certain subproject.

Please use --tests for selecting the tests.