Test, if I don’t want to trigger the whole thing

If you want to avoid that the whole Spring Context is started for all of your integration tests, you can take a look at other test annotations that create a sliced context:

• @WebMvcTest creates a Spring Context with only MVC related beans
• @DataJpaTest creates a Spring Context with only JPA/JDBC related beans
• etc.

In addition to this, I also would remove your CommandLineRunner from your main entry Spring Boot entry point class. Otherwise also the annotations above would trigger the logic.

Therefore you can outsource it to another @Component class:

@Component
public class WhateverInitializer implements CommandLineRunner{

  @Autowired
  private ApplicationEventPublisher publisher;

   // ...

  @Override
  public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
     ...
     // read data from a file and publishing an event
  }


}

Apart from this you can also use @Profile("production") on your Spring beans to only populate them when a specific profile is active. This way you can either include or exluce them for all your integration tests if you don’t want e.g. this startup logic always.