Announcing Testcontainers Desktop Free Application

Since the first days of Testcontainers, having an always-running app has consistently been on our wishlist. The idea came up repeatedly, especially as we developed and brainstormed features like fixed ports (#WeWantPostgresOn5432), stable reusable containers, and when we discussed the holistic debugging story. Some features received library-only workarounds and limited implementations, but many requests were deprioritized, or left to very advanced users of the library… until now!

Earlier this year we expanded the Testcontainers experience by launching Testcontainers Cloud in public beta to let teams test without limits and remove the complexity of running containers across a range of different environments and configurations. A desktop application was mandatory; that’s how Testcontainers Cloud Desktop – the foundation for everything we wanted to build – was born. 

As our excitement grew, so did our ideas; we ended up with a Pandora’s box of them! And we got to thinking: How could non-Cloud users of Testcontainers benefit? Since our mission is to make the Testcontainers experience the best possible, it didn’t take long to make a simple decision… to donate Testcontainers Cloud Desktop and its features to the community as a free Testcontainers Desktop application!

Testcontainers Desktop is a reflection of 8+ years of working on Testcontainers: listening to – and taking to heart – our community and doing our best to ensure a great developer experience.

What does this mean for individual developers? Simply put, local development with Testcontainers will now be easier than ever! Included in this release are features that allow you to set fixed ports to easily debug and connect to running containers, or freeze containers to prevent their shutdown while you debug. The app also lets you easily switch your local container runtime (no more .testcontainers.properties manipulations when you want to use Testcontainers with OrbStack/Colima/Rancher Desktop or… Podman!), and even includes 300 minutes per month of Testcontainers Cloud for you to try!

Here is a short demo:

Of course, this is just the beginning; our roadmap is growing every day thanks to feedback from our users, Testcontainers Champions, and the rest of our beloved community!