Testcontainers is an open source Java 8 library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.
Unit testing is nice, but without a proper integration testing you might not know how your application will behave once it’s deployed to the real environment. Before the Docker, configuring the environment for integration testing was painful – people were using fake database implementations, mocking servers, usually it wasn’t cross-platform as well. But now, we can easily prepare the environment with Docker for our tests.
Testcontainers makes it easy to launch useful Docker containers for the duration of JUnit tests:
- Data access layer integration tests: use a containerized instance of a MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle database to test your data access layer code for complete compatibility, but without requiring complex setup on developers’ machines and safe in the knowledge that your tests will always start with a known DB state. Any other database type that can be containerized can also be used.
- Application integration tests: for running your application in a short-lived test mode with dependencies, such as databases, message queues or web servers.
- UI/Acceptance tests: use containerized web browsers, compatible with Selenium, for conducting automated UI tests. Each test can get a fresh instance of the browser, with no browser state, plugin variations or automated browser upgrades to worry about. And you get a video recording of each test session, or just each session where tests failed.
Video producer: http://geecon.org/