There are two ways to create a MockMvc instance: using Spring Boot's auto-configuration or hand-crafting it.

Following Spring Boot's auto-configuration principle, we only need to annotate our test with @WebMvcTest. This annotation not only ensures to auto-configure MockMvc but also creates a sliced Spring context containing only MVC-related beans.

To keep the sliced test context small, we can pass the class name of the controller we want to test: @WebMvcTest(MyController.cass). Otherwise, Spring will create a context including all our controller endpoints.

The second approach is helpful if we're using Spring without Spring Boot or if we want to fine-tune the setup. The MockMvcBuilders class provides several entry points to construct a MockMvc instance: