CI

Making Your Testcontainers Experience Smoother

Integration tests are nice. We all know that and love using them, don’t we? It’s just using all those databases, message brokers and other things as real dependencies, only wrapped by Testcontainers, might result in a really heavy CI/CD pipeline and developers’ attitude to never run them locally, because they’re so slooooooooooow. What if I could show you a number of techniques, mindset changes and tricks to get your integration tests shortened from quarters to seconds? Would that be interesting for you, to benefit from the confidence integrations tests give you, before you’re able to brew a fresh coffee? It’s really not about re-inventing the wheel, but using it the smart way.

How to shorten builds using Testcontainers

Some people complain that they’re not doing integration tests “because they take too much time.” All right, the interaction with real dependencies sometimes can’t be made shorter, but there are surely ways to start the databases, message brokers, and so on faster if you happen to use Testcontainers for that.

In this entry, I’ll be using Java. However, since Testcontainers is (from a certain angle) a convenient way to interoperate with Docker-compatible containers using the programming language you know, this should apply to other technology stacks as well. I’m pretty sure that after grasping the idea, one should be able to translate it to Go or C#.

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