Spring Boot Testcontainers - Integration Testing made easy!

In this tutorial you are going to learn how to write an integration test in Spring Boot using Testcontainers. We are going to use Testcontainers to spin up a PostgreSQL database in a container and use that for our tests. We will write a Repository test and a Controller test that calls the repository that talks to our database.
🔗Resources & Links mentioned in this video:
GitHub Repo: github.com/dan...
Testcontainers: www.testcontainers.com
JsonPlaceholder Service: jsonplaceholde...
Spring Blog Article: spring.io/blog...
👋🏻Connect with me:
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[@thilaks3895]

That was a fantastic video! It's been extremely helpful in understanding integration testing. I'd love to see a video specifically focused on best practices for integration testing in production environments. This would be a great resource for beginners like myself.

[@stefanoforgiarini339]

The best explanation on spring boot and integration tests with testcontainer. Your videos are so precious. Thank you so much

[@maheshbabu5400]

Yes you are right, often due to time constraints we often skip writing test cases😅

[@DanVega]

Right!

[@IvanRandomDude]

Yeah. So called TDD - Testless Driven Development

[@geekwithabs]

Loved the video. Thank you!

[@johannesAkse-yh9ln]

Great tutorial as already stated by most commenters. One thing though: Around 31 minutes in, your test fails because you now have 31 objects in your test data. You update the test to make the test pass. Might the reason the test fails in the first place be that the @Transactional and @Rollback does not work when inserting to the database via the RestTemplate? The Spring docs state that: "The Spring Framework does not support propagation of transaction contexts across remote calls, as high-end application servers do." Since this is a call onto the endpoint, not on the repository, this may be the cause of the error. Im all new to both Spring, Spring boot and Spring data jdbc and transactions, so I might very well be wrong.

[@sohaibelbokhari8319]

That's exactly what I noticed; the rollback is not considered when we perform HTTP calls during test execution

[@vicariousgreek5711]

Dan where can someone get a spring t-shirt? 😢 I have looked everywhere…

[@ninadan2204]

Thank you Dan for this useful video. It seems @Transactional and @Rollback don't work with servlet environment (client and server run in separate threads -> in separate transactions). I have used annotations @Order and @TestMethodOrder to set the order of tests' execution.

[@danielmachadovasconcelos877]

What are the tradeoffs of using it rather than the docker-compose file with the new docker-compose support of spring boot? Doesn’t it seems you now have two places where you configure your infrastructure? 🤔 One in the docker compose yml file and another with the testcontainer Java code. 😢 Great videos by the way! 😊

[@DanVega]

The docker compose is used for development. When you run a test you don't have access to that.

[@vivekguptacs]

Does testcontainer support sqlserver as well instead of postgress

[@anandsingh-pw6mm]

Loved the content and appreciate the effort, I often struggle with writing better logs which actually meaningful when time comes, what your say on it. TIA Anand

[@peshutanpavri1599]

Hey this is good, i just want to ask, what if i want to test the database with the @DataJpaTest without the whole App context, could I use this ? Also if I want a fixed port, Cant I just pull the url & passwords from the .properties files ?

[@ssantosh.sarkar]

Dan, you are really an asset for whoever wants to learn spring in very easy way.

[@JamilJB]

It's not easy at all. We have used testcontainers for blackbox testing. It depends on the microservice, but it took 1-3 min to build up the entire test environment. Their experimental feature allows us to reuse docker networks. So I could reduce the time to build up containers to 20-30 seconds. The second problem is to automate these tests, automic jar is not a solution for this problem. It's just a way of solving a problmen when you have no solution. In conclusion, it's not easy to write integrationtests with testcontainer. It will have consequences for the projects. There are reasons to use this framework for sure but there are also weak points and if you are not solve these weak points, then this framework will turn against you

[@DanielRevotiuk]

Which way of integrationtesting do you prefer as an engineer? I have no working expirience so I hope you'll share about your preferences. Thank you

[@MrSurprise777]

Thanks for sharing! Very useful. Is there a way to speed up the compile time ? I'm using Mysql image for test containers. I takes about a minute to compile before tests are running.

[@DanVega]

It should not take that long. I have used MySQL / PostgreSQL and it takes seconds. It might help to turn on more logging and see if you notice anything strange going on.

[@hanumanthram6754]

I have a doubt. Without configuring the datasouce (url, username, password) how it is working and storing the data in db?

[@sefumies]

Its not you are correct, in fact Im suprised its working here as no jdbc connection has been setup in the repo application.properties file

[@alexswak]

I assume you are not going to write sql schemas all the time? It's a great video, but my gripe with such tutorials is that they most of the time don't show the complexity of real world scenarios. Two big aspects lacking here in my opinion: 1- handling migrations to the testcontainer in a more realistic way than writing schemas manually. 2- handling authentication. It's a great video nonetheless and much appreciated, but I hope you can talk more about that and show use cases that are more "real-world".

[@VLADICA94KG]

Thanks for the great videos, as always. One small thing: I guess your update test is not doing anything since you never called update endpoint. 😀

[@adriamanes]

Nice video and great explanation! I have one question: If I have so many test classes that share read/write resources, best approach is to decouple dependencies between them first? What about parallelism with multiple container instances? Thank you so much!

[@scrumtuous]

Learned so much!

[@DanVega]

Thank you for watching 🤩

[@stephaneislistening6103]

In my case i could not get the Rollback annotation to roll back so as to remove the added post in the successful test case, which caused a failed count on the find all test case of 101 instead of 100.

[@sohaibelbokhari8319]

i think that @Transactional rollback could not be done when we performe http call in integration tests

[@ahmetsahin2450]

How to create tables for database while using JDBC?

[@m3hdim3hdi]

didnt work for me the image does not get pulled edit: i was using @Test from junit 4 instead of 5

[@eddylequartier]

Hello Dan. I do not understand why i got this message when i launch test into Intellij IDEA : " java: invalid source release 19 with --enable-preview (preview language features are only supported for release 21) " All is fine, in terminal with mvn command "mvn clean test" but not in the IDE. why ?

[@jeffreysmith9837]

you try to cut down on time so much it just turns out sloppy

[@nechititudor4266]

Just discovered your channel these past days, big gold mine! Keep it up and thanks for the help! I was wondering how you easily use the HTTP instead of curl command and the JSON being formatted.. I tried various packages but it did not work for me.

[@m3hdim3hdi]

HTTPie

[@maneshipocrates2264]

Great stuff.

[@DanVega]

Thanks!

[@manoelcamposdev]

The spring-boot-starter-data-jdbc was missing in my project.

[@codeful_dev]

I don't think the transactional is working as we think in the video: According to the Spring Boot 3.2 Docs: If your test is @Transactional, it rolls back the transaction at the end of each test method by default. However, as using this arrangement with either RANDOM_PORT or DEFINED_PORT implicitly provides a real servlet environment, the HTTP client and server run in separate threads and, thus, in separate transactions. Any transaction initiated on the server does not roll back in this case. Why are the Spring Boot docs better than the Spring Framework? I have been muddling through this issue.

[@Juanj0se22]

hey @dan!, great resources! I love the way you express the process :D Im also trying to follow best practices, and noted that you skip adding the public modifiers on method? are you following some specific convention that I can check out? or is just for tutorial simplicity and speed? thanks again for your time and effort!

[@markswellmenezes1854]

This video are awsome, better then Testcontainers doc, I'll immediatly start to follow you 😅

[@sarkar_957]

You are always best sir!!

[@DanVega]

Thank you so much 😀

[@birgitkratz904]

Great video again, Dan. Could you please add the link to the blog post you mentioned at the end of the video. Thank you so much.

[@markkuuss]

Hey Dan, love the videos. Can we consider this still in the scope of Unit Tests? I have the impression this is actually a semi-Integration test

[@hemerfyou]

Hi Dan, thank you a lot for this video. Do you have any examples using Kafka with test containers?

[@ПетришакВасиль]

What is the best way to configure test container in multi-module gradle project?

[@hamidoubalde2517]

@Dan Vega is it possible to test security context when making these tests? Thanks

[@saidoubarry4455]

Thanks for sharing It’s gonna be helpful

[@mehnaazmohiuddin]

in public void setup we are using the system undertest . is this ok ?

[@viratsuresh5946]

Dan, can you cover integration test cases using H2 database

[@rupeshpatil6957]

Good explanation. Thanks Dan

[@milad_mo]

Thank you, a great and practical tutorial

[@elhadjibrahimabalde1234]

great tutorial thanks

[@Sucheit]

so easy, unbelievable

[@manoelcamposdev]

Great tutorial. Thanks for that.

[@emileastih9006]

Great video thanks 👍

[@menabebawy390]

Awesome dude

[@hamidrezarezaei1623]

Very great explanation till the last minute 👏🏼 About the last bit though: When we're not specifying orders for our Unit Tests, it might run them in any order, right? So when we're writing tests, they should pass independently and constantly (regardless of the order). Now, when we're inserting a new post, then the vount would be 101. If it runs the count test first, it would be 100. So, either a test on the count is not a good idea, or we should remove the recently added post right after testing insertion in the same test method.

[@mehnaazmohiuddin]

Yes, they run in any order

[@morpheus4564]

🎉I like the style you show the stuff 🎉

[@nathanlively]

Hey Dan, I followed along with you, but I'm getting this error: Caused by: java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError: Exception java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/data/jdbc/repository/config/AbstractJdbcConfiguration [in thread "main"] Maybe it won't work since I'm using JPA instead of JDBC?

[@TheoHavard]

In case someone else got the issue: You need to change the annotation of the *RespositoryTest class from @DataJdbcTest to @DataJpaTest