I have an acceptance testing project that uses Maven, Cucumber, Java, CDI and JUnit. (JAR packaging). Cucumber is executed by the maven-surefire-plugin via a unit test like the following:

@CucumberOptions(
    plugin = { "json:target/cucumber.json", "html:target/cucumber-report.html" },
    features = { "src/test/features" },
    tags = { "~@wip" }
)
@RunWith(Cucumber.class)
public class RunCukesTest {
}

I believe that this is fairly standard. The Cucumber step definitions also need a beans.xml file for their CDI beans, and this is located in src/test/resources/META-INF/. The project has no src/main/ directory at all, and so I have configured maven-compiler-plugin with:

<skipMain>true</skipMain>

The skipMain setting is not strictly necessary; Maven "does the right thing" without it.

This all worked fine in NetBeans 8.0 too. However, NetBeans 8.1 is repeatedly recreating the non-existent src/main/java/ directory! And this is a problem because as soon as src/main/java/ exists, NetBeans starts complaining that it can no longer find beans.xml either. I am guessing that this is because NetBeans starts searching for the beans.xml file in the wrong place.

Everything would be fine if only either I could convince NetBeans that src/main/java/ does NOT need to exist for this project, or NetBeans could could locate its beans.xml file regardless of whether src/main/java/ exists or not.

I have briefly considered pushing my test code into the src/main/ directory instead of src/test/, but that is not how maven-surefire-plugin expects to work either. I have also tried configuring my POM as follows:

<build>
    <sourceDirectory>${project.basedir}/src/test/java</sourceDirectory>
    ...
</build>

But this confuses NetBeans even more!