Crate testcontainers

source ·
Expand description

A library for integration testing against docker containers from within Rust.

This crate is the official Rust language fork of Testcontainers.

Tests should be self-contained and isolated. While this is usually easy for unit-tests, integration-tests typically require a more complex environment. The testcontainers ecosystem facilitates self-contained and isolated integration tests. It allows to easily spin up Docker containers from within your tests and removes them afterwards.

A very typical usecase for testcontainers are integration-tests of persistence layers. These require an actual database to be present. Using testcontainers, your tests can spin up database containers themselves, without the need for any other setup.

§Main benefits

  • Run integration tests in parallel (because each test sets up its own environment)
  • Run integration tests the same way you run unit tests (cargo test and you are fine)

§Usage

Unsurprisingly, working with testcontainers is very similar to working with Docker itself.

First, you need to define the Image that you want to run, and then simply call the start method on it from either the AsyncRunner or SyncRunner trait. This will return you ContainerAsync or Container respectively. Containers implement Drop. As soon as they go out of scope, the underlying docker container is removed. To disable this behavior, you can set ENV variable TESTCONTAINERS_COMMAND to keep.

See examples in the corresponding runner (AsyncRunner and SyncRunner)

§Docker host resolution

You can change the configuration of the Docker host used by the client in two ways:

  • environment variables
  • ~/.testcontainers.properties file (a Java properties file, enabled by the properties-config feature)
§The host is resolved in the following order:
  1. Docker host from the tc.host property in the ~/.testcontainers.properties file.
  2. DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
  3. Docker host from the “docker.host” property in the ~/.testcontainers.properties file.
  4. Else, the default Docker socket will be returned.

§Docker authentication

Sometimes the Docker images you use live in a private Docker registry. For that reason, Testcontainers for Rust gives you the ability to read the Docker configuration and retrieve the authentication for a given registry. Configuration is fetched in the following order:

  1. DOCKER_AUTH_CONFIG environment variable, unmarshalling the string value from its JSON representation and using it as the Docker config.
  2. DOCKER_CONFIG environment variable, as an alternative path to the Docker config file.
  3. else it will load the default Docker config file, which lives in the user’s home, e.g. ~/.docker/config.json.

§Ecosystem

testcontainers is the core crate that provides an API for working with containers in a test environment. The only image that is provided by the core crate is the GenericImage, which is a simple wrapper around any docker image.

However, it does not provide ready-to-use modules, you can implement your Images using the library directly or use community supported testcontainers-modules.

§Usage in production code

Although nothing inherently prevents testcontainers from being used in production code, the library itself was not designed with that in mind. For example, many methods will panic if something goes wrong but because the usage is intended to be within tests, this is deemed acceptable.

Re-exports§

Modules§

Structs§