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Comment by fcmgr | Hacker News Reader

I've had good experience with testcontainers (https://testcontainers.com/) to do that sort of thing.

testcontainers is great. I struggled a bit with testcontainers due to the nature of one container per test which just felt too slow for writing gray/blackbox tests. The startup time for postgres was > 10 seconds. After a bit of experimenting, I am now quite happy with my configuration which allows me to have a snappy, almost instant testing experience.

My current setup:

- generate a new psql testcontainer _or_ reuse an existing one by using a fixed name for the container - connect to the psql container with no database selected - create a new database using a random database name - connect to the randomly generated database - initialize the project's tables - run a test - drop the database - keep the testcontainer up and running and reuse with next test

With this setup, most tests run sub-second;

If your table setup process starts to get slow like ours, checkout psql TEMPLATE (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/manage-ag-templatedb...). Do the setup once to a db with known name, then use it as the template when creating the db for each test.

You can run Pg against a RAM disk too, if the container isn't effectively already doing that.

And tests can often use a DB transaction to rollback, unless the code under test already uses them.

Yes it’s a shame that this is not leading the discussion, works very well and surprisingly efficient in our experience compared to manually setting up docker containers or docker compose

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