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  5. Earthly vs Testcontainers

Earthly vs Testcontainers

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Testcontainers
Testcontainers
Stacks139
Followers59
Votes0
GitHub Stars8.5K
Forks1.8K
Earthly
Earthly
Stacks9
Followers14
Votes0
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks439

Earthly vs Testcontainers: What are the differences?

Introduction

When it comes to build automation and testing, Earthly and Testcontainers are two popular tools that offer different capabilities. Below are the key differences between Earthly and Testcontainers.

  1. Purpose: Earthly is a build automation tool that focuses on creating reproducible builds and managing build workflows efficiently. It helps in simplifying complex build processes and ensuring consistency in the build environment. On the other hand, Testcontainers is mainly used for running integration tests with Docker containers. It provides a convenient way to spin up isolated containers during testing, making it easier to set up dependencies for testing.

  2. Scope: Earthly is designed for building and managing the entire development workflow, including building, testing, and deploying applications. It offers features like caching, parallel execution, and dependency management to streamline the build process. In contrast, Testcontainers is specifically tailored for integration testing with containers, allowing developers to define and manage test containers in different programming languages.

  3. Workflow Integration: Earthly integrates seamlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines and workflows, enabling developers to incorporate it into their build processes easily. It provides native support for popular CI tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions. Testcontainers, on the other hand, is more focused on integration testing within the local development environment or in automated test suites, making it ideal for testing containerized applications.

  4. Dependency Management: Earthly offers a robust dependency management system that helps in caching dependencies and ensuring consistent builds across different environments. It allows developers to define build outputs and reuse cached dependencies to speed up the build process. Testcontainers, on the other hand, simplifies managing dependencies for integration testing by encapsulating them in Docker containers, making it easier to set up test environments.

  5. Community Support: Earthly has a growing community of users and contributors who actively maintain and enhance the tool. The community provides support, resources, and documentation to help users get started with Earthly and address any issues they encounter. Testcontainers also has a strong community backing, with active development and support for various programming languages, making it easier for developers to leverage containerized testing in their projects.

  6. Learning Curve: Earthly aims to provide a user-friendly and intuitive build automation experience, with declarative syntax and clear documentation to guide users through the process. It is relatively easy to get started with Earthly, even for developers new to build automation. Testcontainers, while not overly complex, may have a slightly steeper learning curve for developers who are not familiar with Docker or containerization concepts, requiring some additional setup and configuration.

In Summary, Earthly is a versatile build automation tool for managing build workflows, while Testcontainers excels in simplifying integration testing with containerized environments.

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Detailed Comparison

Testcontainers
Testcontainers
Earthly
Earthly

It is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.

It is a build automation tool for the post-container era. It allows you to execute all your builds in containers. This makes them self-contained, reproducible, portable and parallel. You can use it to create Docker images and artifacts (eg binaries, packages, arbitrary files).

Data access layer integration tests; Application integration tests; UI/Acceptance tests
Programming language agnostic; Reproducible builds; Parallelism that just works; Mono-repo friendly; Multi-repo friendly
Statistics
GitHub Stars
8.5K
GitHub Stars
11.9K
GitHub Forks
1.8K
GitHub Forks
439
Stacks
139
Stacks
9
Followers
59
Followers
14
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
Oracle
Oracle
Docker
Docker
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
MySQL
MySQL
Spock Framework
Spock Framework
JUnit
JUnit
CircleCI
CircleCI
JavaScript
JavaScript
Python
Python
Java
Java
Golang
Golang
Jenkins
Jenkins
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions

What are some alternatives to Testcontainers, Earthly?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

k3s

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

Flocker

Flocker

Flocker is a data volume manager and multi-host Docker cluster management tool. With it you can control your data using the same tools you use for your stateless applications. This means that you can run your databases, queues and key-value stores in Docker and move them around as easily as the rest of your app.

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