Way to “fail fast” for junit with the maven surefire plugin

Your problem is that browsers don't even send the fragment identifier to the server, so even if Nginx was willing to rewrite based on that, it wouldn't be able to do so because it wasn't provided with that info.

I'm really curious about how your previous solution worked with Apache - I just double checked and my Firefox doesn't send the fragment identifier in the request (according to a packet capture). Maybe whatever browser you were using somehow behaved differently.

A potential solution would be to escape the hash character by URL-encoding it, which makes it become %23. You can use some Javascript to do the modification automatically on page load (check whether a fragment identifier is present, and if it is, convert it to %23 and refresh the page using the new URL). You would then need to rewrite based on that instead of the original hash character.

I had the same problem (JUnit tests failed in Maven Surefire but passed in Eclipse) and managed to solve it by setting forkMode to always in the maven surefire configuration in pom.xml:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.12</version>
    <configuration>
        <forkMode>always</forkMode>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Surefire parameters: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-surefire-plugin/test-mojo.html

Edit (January 2014):

As Peter Perháč pointed out, the forkMode parameter is deprecated since Surefire 2.14. Beginning from Surefire 2.14 use this instead:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.16</version>
    <configuration>
        <reuseForks>false</reuseForks>
        <forkCount>1</forkCount>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

For more information see Fork Options and Parallel Test Execution