Adopt Testcontainers Desktop as your container runtime (beta)

The vision for Testcontainers Desktop is to deliver a batteries-included developer experience for local development and testing. Currently, the app lets you switch container runtimes, and the free plan even includes 300 minutes per month of cloud runtime! But so far, you needed to install and maintain docker, rancher or podman separately. No longer!

As of version 1.4.18 Testcontainers Desktop now embeds a lightweight and fast runtime, optimized for Testcontainers usage. The embedded runtime is currently in early access, and only available on macOS 11 or later to benefit from Apple's native Virtualization Framework.

To get started, simply select the "Embedded Runtime" in the menu. The runtime takes a few seconds to initialize the first time you run your tests. If you run into any issues, please join us in the #testcontainers-desktop channel of our public slack to troubleshoot.

Updated on Oct 16th 2023:

• Enabling the runtime used to require adding embedded.runtime.enabled = true to your ~/.testcontainers.properties file. As of version 1.4.18 of Testcontainers Desktop, the runtime is now available by default.

• The runtime previously required macOS version 13.3 or later. As of version 1.4.18 of Testcontainers Desktop, it should now function on macOS version 11 or later.