Optimising your Inner Development Loop with Spring Boot 3.1+ and Docker

Spring Boot 3.1+ introduced a new feature called “Development-time Services” that helps optimise your inner development loop. This feature allows you to use Docker Compose or Testcontainers to manage the lifecycles of Docker containers during automated and ad hoc integration testing. However, only a limited number of the more popular types containers are supported out-of-the-box.

In this live coding exercise I will show you how to use this new feature with both Docker Compose and Testcontainers. Firstly how to use it as-is, then I will show how to integrate new container types by leveraging the ConnectionDetails abstraction that was added to Spring Boot in version 3.1. This will be done using the generic container and custom module support in Testcontainers.