Testcontainers

Testcontainers for Rust plays well with the native cargo test.

The ideal use case is for integration or end to end tests. It helps you to spin up and manage the dependencies life cycle via Docker.

1. System requirements¶

Please read the system requirements page before you start.

2. Install Testcontainers for Rust¶

If your tests are async:
```
cargo add testcontainers
```
If you don't use async and want to use the blocking API:
```
cargo add testcontainers --features blocking
```

3. Spin up Redis¶

use testcontainers::{core::{IntoContainerPort, WaitFor}, runners::AsyncRunner, GenericImage};

#[tokio::test]
async fn test_redis() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error + 'static>> {
    let container = GenericImage::new("redis", "7.2.4")
        .with_exposed_port(6379.tcp())
        .with_wait_for(WaitFor::message_on_stdout("Ready to accept connections"))
        .start()?
        .await;
}

Here we use the GenericImage struct to create a Redis container.

GenericImage::new accepts the image name and tag.
with_exposed_port adds a port to be exposed from the container (can be called multiple times).
with_wait_for allows to pass conditions (WaitFor) of container rediness. It is important to get this set because it helps to know when the container is ready to receive any traffic. In this case, we check for the logs we know come from Redis, telling us that it is ready to accept requests.
start is a function of the AsyncRunner trait that starts the container. The same logic is applicable for SyncRunner if you are using blocking feature.

When you use with_exposed_port you have to imagine yourself using docker run -p <port>. When you do so, dockerd maps the selected <port> from inside the container to a random one available on your host.

In the previous example, we expose 6379 for tcp traffic to the outside. This allows Redis to be reachable from your code that runs outside the container, but it also makes parallelization possible. When you run multiple cargo tests in parallel, each test starts a Redis container, and each of them is exposed on a different random port.

All the containers must be removed at some point, otherwise they will run until the host is overloaded. In order to provide a clean environment, we rely on RAII semantic of containers (Drop trait). Thus, when the container goes out of scope, it is removed by default. However, you can change this behavior by setting the TESTCONTAINERS_COMMAND environment variable to keep.

4. Make your code to talk with the container¶

We will use redis as a client in this example. This code gets the endpoint from the container we just started, and it configures the client.

This is just an example, you can choose any client you want (e.g fred)

use redis::Client;
use testcontainers::{core::{IntoContainerPort, WaitFor}, runners::AsyncRunner, GenericImage};

#[tokio::test]
async fn test_redis() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error + 'static>> {
    let container = GenericImage::new("redis", "7.2.4")
        .with_exposed_port(6379.tcp())
        .with_wait_for(WaitFor::message_on_stdout("Ready to accept connections"))
        .start()?
        .await;
    let host = container.get_host()?;
    let host_port = container.get_host_port_ipv4(REDIS_PORT)?;

    let url = format!("redis://{host}:{host_port}");
    let client = redis::Client::open(url.as_ref())?;
    // do something with the client
}

get_host returns the host that this container may be reached on (may not be the local machine). In most of the cases it will be localhost.
get_host_port_ipv4 returns the mapped host port for an internal port of this docker container. In this case it returns the port that was exposed by the container.

5. Run the test¶

You can run the test via cargo test