Maven surefire could not find ForkedBooter class

To fix it (in 2018), update your openjdk to the latest version, at least 8u191-b12. In case this issue reappears in 2020, it is likely that the default behavior of openjdk was changed, and you will then need to update the maven surefire plugin.

This was a now fixed bug in the openjdk-8 package (behaviour deviates from upstream significantly without need; missing the upstream patch to revert back to disabling a security check) that you just upgraded to. But it is also a bug in the surefire plugin, SUREFIRE-1588, supposedly fixed in surefire 3.0.0-M1: it apparently is using absolute paths in a place where Java will in the future only allow relative path names (and Debian activated the future behavior already).

The package version 8u181-b13-2 states:

• Apply patches from 8u191-b12 security update.

Note that 191-b12 != 181-b13. The 191-b12 security patches were just out a few days ago, and apparently the maintainers wanted to get them to you fast. Updating completely to 191-b12 will likely need additional testing (well, so should have this upload, apparently).

There had been several workaounds:

1. You can install the previous package from snapshots.d.o instead. After downgrading, you can forbid the broken version (if you are using aptitude and not apt) using sudo aptitude forbid-version openjdk-8-jre-headless. For regular "apt" I didn't see a similar forbid mechanism, so you would likely need to use apt pinning to prevent this upgrade from being reinstalled (or you just keep on downgrading again, I hope this will be resolved soon).
2. According to bug tracking, setting the property -Djdk.net.URLClassPath.disableClassPathURLCheck=true with any of the usual methods (e.g., JAVA_FLAGS) should also help. But I have not verified this myself. You can apparently even add the workaround to ~/.m2/settings.xml to get it enabled for all your Maven builds easily.

As you can see, bug tracking works, the issue was narrowed down, and a fixed package is available and a new version of the surefire plugin will come soon!

Set useSystemClassloader to false:

<plugin>    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>    <configuration>        <useSystemClassLoader>false</useSystemClassLoader>    </configuration></plugin>

If you're not inheriting from a parent which has version defined for you (such as the Spring Boot starter) you'll need to define that as well.

I found this workaround and fixed my tests: configure the maven-surefire-plugin not to use the system classloader.