In ScalaTest you can tag individual tests quite easily, like this:

"it does this and that" taggedAs(Tag("requiresDb")) in { ... }

What’s not so well documented is how you can tag a whole suite of tests. If you are writing a suite of database tests, it gets very repetitive to add the taggesAs to every test, and it’s easy to forget aswell. Two years ago Krzysztof Ciesielski blogged about how to tag a whole suite using a java annotation. Here’s an updated version that works with Java 8:

src/test/java/tags/RequiresDb.java:

package tags;

import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;

@org.scalatest.TagAnnotation
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target({ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.TYPE})
public @interface RequiresDb {}

src/test/scala/MyBusinessTest.scala:

import org.scalatest.{ Matchers, WordSpec }

@tags.RequiresDb
class MyBusinessTest extends WordSpec with Matchers {
  "loads business objects from db" in { ... }

Usage from sbt:

• testOnly * -- -n tags.RequiresDb //exclusively run all suites tagged with RequiresDb
• testOnly * -- -l tags.RequiresDb //exclude all suites tagged with RequiresDb