PRpragmaticviber·Apr 14, 2026Submission
Show HN: Write better Go integration tests with open source dockertest v4
3 points · Open discussionory
dockertest
Go2021–2026
ory / dockertest
dockertest
Write better integration tests! Dockertest helps you boot up ephermal docker images for your Go tests with minimal work.
7Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Write better integration tests! Dockertest helps you boot up ephermal docker images for your Go tests with minimal work.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-07-22 14:54:04 UTC to 2026-04-14 13:14:11 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesI am using https://github.com/ory/dockertest for tests, specifically for databases. Is there any advantage to use Testcontainers?
In TestcontainersI've been using Docker containers for integration testing for last few years. I usually roll my own custom solution in Go using the https://github.com/ory/dockertest package though that adds necessary functionality around running migrations, creating kafka topics, or similar. Will definitely need to check out this next time I'm writing a test package
In Testcontainers> - https://godoc.org/github.com/ory/dockertest/v3 - run containers for e2e testing
For this there is also the testcontainers project, which has support for Go and other languages.
https://golang.testcontainers.org/
In How to start a Go project in 2023Things I can't live without in a new Go project in no particular order:
- https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint - meta-linter
- https://goreleaser.com - automate release workflows
- https://magefile.org - build tool that can version your tools
- https://godoc.org/github.com/ory/dockertest/v3 - run containers for e2e testing
- https://github.com/ecordell/optgen - generate functional options
- https://golang.org/x/tools/cmd/stringer - generate String()
- https://mvdan.cc/gofumpt - stricter gofmt
- https://github.com/stretchr/testify - test assertion library
- https://github.com/rs/zerolog - logging
- https://github.com/spf13/cobra - CLI framework
FWIW, I just lifted all the tools we use for https://github.com/authzed/spicedb
We've also written some custom linters that might be useful for other folks: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/t
Read the rest
Dockertest makes it really easy to test Go+Postgresql projects. I use it a lot.
https://github.com/ory/dockertest
In Back to basics: Writing an application using Go and PostgreSQLI use https://github.com/ory/dockertest for my Golang services that need testing. One thing that is nice is I can easily switch out/test both postgresql and cockroachdb.
In Ephemeral Postgres DatabasesThe best time I had so far was with dockertest[0] in go it allows you to spin up containers as part of your test suite which then allows you to test against them. So we have one go pkg that has all our containers that we need regularly.
The biggest benefit there is no need to have a docker compose or have other resources running locally you just can run the test cases if you have docker installed.
[0] https://github.com/ory/dockertest
In MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT