I ran across this issue only by accident because I was investigating a completely different problem. I wrote a quick test to debug my issue and was wondering why custom serializers and deserializers are not registered with the Jackson ObjectMapper. I had a nice init() function that was annotated with @Before. So, what the hell?

Let’s back up a bit for some context.

• Kotlin Project
• Runs on Java 12
• JUnit 5 as test engine
• AssertK for assertions (just for the sake of completeness)

I’m used to JUnit 4, so in my test I used @Before to annotate a setup method. It was one of the many options IntelliJ presented to me.

@Before
fun init() {
    val module = SimpleModule()
    module.addDeserializer(Instant::class.java, InstantDeserializer())
    module.addSerializer(Instant::class.java, InstantSerializer())
    mapper.registerModule(module)
}

The method wasn’t called, however. But it’s annotated! Well, it’s the wrong annotation if you’re using JUnit 5. The correct one is @BeforeEach. This one and @BeforeClass (new name @BeforeAll) have been changed from version 4 to 5 to make their meaning more obvious.

But that’s besides the point. The question is: where does this @Before come from then?

A look at the dependency tree quickly reveals the culprit.

It’s the official JetBrains Kotlin JUnit test artifact. Although it doesn’t hurt me to have it in my project, it certainly caused some confusion and I’d like to avoid that in the future. Hence, I excluded the old version of JUnit in my POM file for this dependency.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jetbrains.kotlin</groupId>
    <artifactId>kotlin-test-junit</artifactId>
    <version>${kotlin.version}</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

Problem solved.