Excontainers - Throwaway containers for your tests

This is great, and something I think is very much needed in the ecosystem!

I believe that this has potential to be used beyond just starting containers from test. For example, we could use this to start/link the accompanying containers when the system starts, or to run containerized one-off commands.

I’ve been meaning to develop something like this myself as the part of the ci library, but it looks like excontainers already solves many of the things I planned.

The usage of ryuk for container cleanup is nice, I didn’t even know about it! My plan was to start a separate OS process (ideally a hidden Erlang node), which would roughly do the same thing. I still plan on trying this out, because I think it could solve a subtle race condition that exists with ryuk.

I wonder why is Docker.Api marked with @moduledoc false? This is something that I think could be useful to the general population, and I think it’s possibly the most important part of this library. Having a simple docker API wrapper would allow people to build various custom abstractions & docker flows.

The synchronous logic based on polling in exec_and_wait likely won’t work for the scenarios I have in mind. I’d probably aim for a reactive approach, i.e. a GenServer that receives response chunks from the start request, and stops once the exec command has finished. That way the client could also handle stdout/stderr in realtime, e.g. by logging the output. I’m not sure if this can be done with tesla, but I think that it should be possible with mint. I’ll try this out myself, because I need this for the ci library, but I can’t commit on time.

In any case, great job, thank for making this!

Hi @sasajuric , thanks a lot for your feedback and for having a look at the code!

I believe that this has potential to be used beyond just starting containers from test

I completely agree with you.
I started with a focus on the testcontainers usecase in order to deliver something potentially useful as soon as possible and get feedback from the community.
However my goal is to do as you suggest and evolve the library to eventually make it useful for more generic scenarios as well.

I think it could solve a subtle race condition that exists with ryuk

Is that race condition specific to your use case, or is it something I should care about for Excontainers too? In the latter case could you tell me more please?

I wonder why is Docker.Api marked with @moduledoc false?

Same reason as above - so far I tried to keep the scope as narrow as possible. But I do plan to work on making the library more generic as soon as I have time.

The synchronous logic based on polling in exec_and_wait likely won’t work for the scenarios I have in mind.

Yeah polling is definitely not optimal, but I thought it was an acceptable shortcut in the initial phases of development.
I plan to try and replace it with a more efficient reactive approach, which would also be useful for other use cases (e.g. waiting for a specific log to detect when the container is ready).

And by the way your CI library is awesome, if this is a feature that could help with your effort I would be happy to make it my priority for the next steps of Excontainers

Thanks a lot again!

It’s a general race condition, but very subtle. Consider the following sketch:

container_id = start_my_container()
Excontainers.ResourcesReaper.register({"id", container_id})

If the beam node is taken down after docker run is invoked, but before the container is registered, the container will not be reaped.

Admittedly such scenario is not very likely, but given time it’s bound to happen at some point, and it may in turn lead to bugs which are hard to track.

The only solution I can think of is to run an external program which would be both, the starter of docker containers, and the “garbage collector”. When we want to start the container we ask the program to do this for us (which would obviously be wrapped under some nice API). That way, even if the beam node is taken down in the middle of the container start, the external program can still clean up all the resources. My idea is to try implementing this in Elixir, rather than go. If this works, we could discuss the option of merging it to excontainers.

No need to change your priorities for the moment My plan is to implement my own docker exec as a wrapper around OsCmd. This would give me all the features of OsCmd practically for free, most notably async & sync execution with reactive output capture and proper cleanup on early shutdown. As a consequence, such implementation would use CLI instead of the HTTP API, so I don’t think it makes sense to have it in excontainers.

You are right about the race condition, thanks for letting me know!

I’m not sure if this would fit your scenario, but perhaps a simpler solution could be to use something different than the container ID to register the container for reaping, so that we can set up the reaper before starting the container (Ryuk supports all kinds of filters – by name, label, etc.)
For example we could generate a unique identifier (e.g. a UUID) for the container, set the reaper to kill containers with label e.g. reaping_id=<my-id> and then start the container with the unique label.

My idea is to try implementing this in Elixir, rather than go. If this works, we could discuss the option of merging it to excontainers.

Sure! I’d be happy to make excontainers 100% elixir, even for containerized dependencies

My plan is to implement my own docker exec as a wrapper around OsCmd […]

Yeah I agree both that excontainers would not be a good fit for your usecase, and that bringing CLI-based functionalities in excontainers would not make much sense.

I’ll let you know if I make substantial progress on that front thanks again for your feedback!

Oh, I see now that in the code that filters are “lazy”. Yeah that’s a great idea that would definitely work! Maybe consider mentioning this approach in docs.

I’ll still give this a try, b/c I want explore some ideas, but it looks like using custom unique labels will work.

Okay, I am currently looking into this, though wondering about best strategies to migrate the throwaway database.

Also I’d really like a shared_container that I could start once and that would stay for all the tests and not those in a single module.

Hi @NobbZ , thanks for your feedback.
Looking back at what you wrote here, I’m starting to think that excontainers may actually not be a perfect fit for your needs.

Excontainers is mostly useful to spawn short-lived containers to allow running integration tests asynchronously and with good test isolation.
Using it to spawn long-running containers is possible, but not very straightforward.

Of course any suggestion to make it more suitable for your scenario is very appreciated
Some potential problems I see are:

• we’d need a way to start containers and run migrations (if any) before the application starts, otherwise other processes that depend on these containers could start to break. This may not be a big deal in some cases, as everything could go back to normal once migrations are done, but even then it would still be ugly.
• if you need the container to listen on a specific port on the host (eg. postgres on 5432) then it would be hard to handle multiple instances of your application (eg. one for your local server and the other to run tests / run a REPL). New instances of your app would try to spawn the container and fail due to the port being already taken.

In case of a long-running container shared by the whole test suite, you could start the container and run migrations in your test_helper.exs.

If you have containers under your supervision tree then it could be a little more tricky, as you’d need some way to execute migrations once the process (and hence the container) is started.

This is something that I’ll consider to add.
For now the easiest ways to start a permanent container are either to start it manually in your test_helper.exs or to place {Excontainer.Container, your_container_configuration} under the supervision tree of your app.

This is perfect for what I need, and pretty much anyone who uses stripity_stripe for using the Stripe API.

The recommended (er, at least when I was actively writing the tests) was to use stripe-mock and boot that up in Docker when running integration-level tests. Since I’m impatient I am all for high ROI, so I generally focus on integration level tests. There’s only so much I would like to create Mocks for an API with a huge footprint..

So I always manually run a short Bash script to boot it up and then run the tests, which isn’t that fun ;/

#!/bin/bash
docker run --rm -it -p 12111-12112:12111-12112 stripemock/stripe-mock:latest

This would be awesome to do all this automatically!

Can this be hooked up to a tag, so it only boots up if tagged tests are going to be run?

Anyways thanks for this package! I think it’s much needed.

I went to the official Testcontainers Slack and expressed an interest in starting an Elixir version, and their head of product linked me to this thread!

If there’s anything I can do to assist with this project, let me know!

Hi @Nezteb!
Sorry for the late reply - I’m glad you’re interested in this project

I think the library is currently fine for simple use-cases, but far from being as stable, powerful and flexible as Testcontainers.

As you can see from Github I’m currently not actively working on it, and I’m mostly taking care of reviewing and merging PRs - even though I have some ideas I’d love to eventually experiment on.

Do you have any specific objective or activity in mind that you’d like to tackle?

Some points that IMHO could be worth exploring are:

• autogenerating the bulk of the docker integration logic by parsing the official openapi spec. I started doing some experiments here but it’s still a very incomplete draft for the moment
• streaming logs from containers, which would be useful eg. when waiting for a container to start, since now the only option for that is polling by periodically executing a command. Streaming logs is rather easy, I successfully experimented it here but never ended up integrating it in excontainers.
• tracking the state of containers reactively. This could be done by monitoring docker events but I feel that getting it right may not be easy.
• supporting dependencies between containers, and possibly more complex setups involving eg. shared networks, volumes etc. I’m not sure what would be the best way to approach this, though ideally I think it’d be cool to try and integrate that as much as possible within the OTP model.

In any case, if you want to either hack on excontainers, fork it or start a new package from scratch, I’d be happy to support if that can be helpful