Applying Rules to JUnit tests - Running using ant and selenium-server.jar

There are quite a lot of really excellent posts on how to apply a Rule to a JUnit Test. But unfortunately, nowhere has it specified how to run the tests using ant. Rather, how to edit ant build.xml to include junit.jar (I use selenium-server.jar) in the classpath. After long hours of googling, I figured out the following.

Between, to run tests without using ant, see Run JUnit tests from terminal using selenium.jar

To run tests using ant, I hope you have ant configured on your machine. If you are using ant with junit.jar, as they say, {Copied from http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/junit.html}

Note: You must have junit.jar available. You can do one of:

1. Put both junit.jar and ant-junit.jar in ANT_HOME/lib.
2. Do not put either in ANT_HOME/lib, and instead include their locations in your CLASSPATH environment variable.
3. Add both JARs to your classpath using -lib.
4. Specify the locations of both JARs using a <classpath> element in a <taskdef> in the build file.
5. Leave ant-junit.jar in its default location in ANT_HOME/lib but include junit.jar in the <classpath> passed to <junit>. (since Ant 1.7)

In my project, I use ant with selenium-server.jar. Selenium server contains junit, so it's not required to include junit explicitly in the classpath. Okay, so now, in the build file, edit your target  to contain following elements:

<target name="junit" depends="build">

        <java classname="org.junit.runner.JUnitCore">

            <classpath>

                <path location="selenium_server/selenium-server-standalone-xxx.xx.jar"/>

            </classpath>

        </java>

        <junit fork="no" haltonfailure="no" printsummary="true" failureProperty="test.failed" dir=".">

            <test name="src.SampleTest" todir="./report" />

        </junit>

</target>

Now, if you need to see how to write a simple test using Rule, 

package src;

import org.junit.Rule;

import org.junit.Test;

import org.junit.rules.TestWatcher;

import org.junit.runner.Description;

import static org.junit.Assert.assertTrue;

public class SampleTest {

    @Rule

    public OpenBrowserOnFailure onFailure = new OpenBrowserOnFailure();

   @Test

    public void shouldFail() {

        assertTrue(false);

    }

}

class OpenBrowserOnFailure extends TestWatcher {

    public OpenBrowserOnFailure() {

        System.out.println("in constructor");

    }

    @Override

    protected void failed(Throwable e, Description description) {

        System.out.println("Only executed when a test fails");

    }

}

and the output will be:
in constructor
Only executed when a test fails