Testcontainers is a library that starts your test dependencies in a container and stop them after you are done using them. Testcontainers needs Docker socket access for mounting within its reaper, so I made a (for now minimal) different library that does not need Docker socket access. It also works with daemonless Podman.
This is terrific. More folks would be more excited if they realized how much less hassle Podman is than Docker.
What problem does this solve that test containers does not? Besides socket access?
Nothing else. Though docker socket issue was important enough.
It says this works via the cli but the docker cli works by talking to the socket so don’t you still need socket access? With podman you just need to startup the user-level socket and set a few env vars and testcontainers works fine. I’m maybe missing the “why” it’s important to avoid direct socket access? Is it to avoid configuring SELinux?
Testcontainers uses ‘ryuk’ to clean up containers and it needs docker socket mounted within its container to work. So if you had any hardening config that prevents the docker socket access within a container e.g user namespace or SELinux then Testcontainers doesn’t work.
And I think it would be nice if Testcontainers ‘just worked’ with Podman without any additional steps.
