Allow container reuse opt-in via API

Hello all,

I’ve enabled support for container reuse in Quarkus dev-services in Quarkus:

• https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/pull/25367

It’s working great, many thanks for the nice improvement; althought so far I’ve only enabled it for selected containers, specifically the ones running relational databases people use for testing.

I’m aware - and have documented - that people need to enable this opt-in by setting the relevant property in the .testcontainers.properties configuration file.

This seems like a wise choice since the feature is currently experimental; yet people in our community have been asking to have this working by default on selected, cherry-picked containers, so it would be nice for us to have a way to opt-in for a particular container without people needing to edit the core configuration file.

I understand it’s possibly not a good time to do so, but eventually as the feature is considered more mature I’d love to see a way for the API to give a stronger hint to the Testcontainer core that a particular container really should be reused.

Proposal

One approach could be for the withReuse method to accept a three-state enum rather than a boolean, like { OFF|ON|According_to_config }.

Additional consequences

The logic to stop containers in Quarkus also needs to know if the container is allowed to be reused. So I suspect some other methods will need to be adapted to support this as wel, such as isShouldBeReused and possibly others.

Many thanks for the consideration! Reported on suggestion from cc/ @kiview at Devoxx 😃

[Sanne]

Fair enough, thanks for all explanations!

I’ll close this now, hopefully a better proposal will emerge in time 😃

[ailjushkin]

Hey guys, If I understood correctly, this feature is not unstable already and can be marked as official behaviour.

So I’d remove unstable API in code and added extended javadoc for this, and a paragraph in the docs, that in this way we are trying to make the settings of the re-use of containers explicit to users from the outside.