ForkedBooter steals window focus on Mac OS while Maven is running

This is about running Maven, specifically.

For most Java applications, any of the solutions from this question on StackOverflow should work.

It’s a matter of passing -Djava.awt.headless=true to the Java process, which can be done for all Java processes by saving that option to a variable named JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS in your .bashrc.

That’s fine as long as you have direct control over the Java process, which is not the case with Maven.

In my case, it was the Failsafe Maven Plugin that caused that annoyance, but some were experiencing the same behavior with an old version of Surefire. The following snippet fixes both.

In your pom.xml, change your existing <plugin> definitions so that they look like this (the important lines are highlighted):

<!-- this is inside your <project><build><plugins> block -->
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${maven.surefire.plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
      <includes>
        <include>**/unit/**/*Test*.java</include>
      </includes>
      <!-- prevent the annoying ForkedBooter process from stealing 
        window focus on Mac OS -->
      <argLine>-Djava.awt.headless=true</argLine>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${maven.failsafe.plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
      <!-- prevent the annoying ForkedBooter process from stealing 
        window focus on Mac OS -->
      <argLine>-Djava.awt.headless=true</argLine>
      <includes>
        <include>**/integration/**/*Test*</include>
      </includes>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <goals>
          <goal>integration-test</goal>
          <goal>verify</goal>
        </goals>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>

Done!

I added this reply to stack exchange as well, but maybe this post will be easier to find (as that question already already had an accepted answer when I replied, and it doesn’t work for Maven). We’ll see!