What is the point of `ContainerDef`?
solarmosaic-kflorence opened this issue · comments
How am I supposed to use ContainerDef? How is it better than just constructing a container itself? Looking at the code, and through use-cases at our company, it seems that at best using ContainerDef creates extra boilerplate we have to maintain in two places (the container settings), and at worst we can't use it at all because we need access to Container.configure in order to configure the underlying container when explicit settings for it aren't defined (quite often). The only real benefit I see currently is that the start() method in the ContainerDef returns the container instead of Unit.
Actually I think ContainerDef might make more sense for consumers of testcontainers-scala to use, rather than being part of the testcontainers-scala implementation. For example, let's say I wanted to use the PostgreSQLContainer. I could make my own ContainerDef for that container that encapsulates whatever settings that make sense for my use-case, and then internally we could use that instead of using the container directly. So actually, that seems to be the main benefit.
I think it's a little confusing that the default implementation has ContainerDef already defined for the provided testcontainer modules, but I guess it doesn't hurt because you can just ignore them as a consumer of the library. Probably this DSL just needs to be documented better.
You can find a detailed discussion in the PR: #78
Yeah I saw that discussion some months ago. It's just that nothing in the TestContainersForAll API actually forces you to use ContainerDef -- you can just use the Container itself if you wanted to. So I was trying to understand the benefit.