Arconia Dev Services
Arconia Dev Services streamline your development workflow by automatically provisioning external services your application depends on during development and testing. No manual setup is required.
Need a database, message broker, or other infrastructure components for your application? Simply add the corresponding Dev Service dependency to your project. When you run your application or tests, the required services start automatically as OCI containers and are seamlessly wired into your application. Zero additional code or configuration needed.
Built on Testcontainers and Spring Boot’s Testcontainers support, the Arconia Dev Services are designed to provide a superior developer experience by eliminating the friction of setting up and managing those services manually in your development environment.
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Dev Services are designed exclusively for development and testing workflows. They are excluded from production builds and have zero impact on your production deployments. |
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Due to limited support in the Spring Boot Maven Plugin for managing dependencies only used for development and testing, using Arconia Dev Services in a Maven project requires additional configuration. |
Using Dev Services
Dev Services are available as separate modules for each supported service. You can find the list of supported services in the Services section below.
When you include a Dev Service module in your project, it automatically starts the corresponding service when you run your application in dev mode or execute your integration tests. The service runs as an OCI container managed by Testcontainers and is automatically integrated into your application, so you don’t need to write any additional code or configuration.
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Dev Services are provisioned as OCI containers. Ensure you have a container runtime like Podman or Docker installed and running in your environment. |
Your application is automatically configured to connect to the Dev Services, which take precedence over any manually configured properties. For example, if you include the arconia-dev-services-postgresql module in your project, a PostgreSQL instance will start automatically when you run your application or tests. The connection details (JDBC URL, username, password) provided by the Dev Service will be used by the application transparently, overriding any manually set properties like spring.datasource.url, spring.datasource.username, or spring.datasource.password.
Spring Boot manages the lifecycle of the Dev Services as beans in the application context. They start when the application context is initialized and stop when the context is closed. This means that the services are available throughout the entire lifecycle of your application or tests. Furthermore, if your application relies on the live-restart features provided by Spring Boot DevTools, the Dev Services won’t be recreated when the application is restarted, ensuring a smooth development experience without unnecessary wait times or state loss.
Dev Services in Gradle
Dev Services are designed exclusively for development and testing workflows. In a Gradle project, you can include Dev Service modules as testAndDevelopmentOnly dependencies. This ensures that the Dev Service is only available during development and test, and is not included in the production build.
Dev Services in Maven
Dev Services are designed exclusively for development and testing workflows. Unlike Gradle, Maven does not offer a way to define dependencies that are only available during development and testing. Nor Spring Boot supports this use case.
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We have raised this issue with the Spring Boot project to suggest addressing this limitation. You can help us raise awareness in gh-46817 and the other issues linked there. |
To work around this limitation, you must explicitly configure the Dev Service dependencies to be considered only when running in dev and test mode. One option is adding them behind a development profile. Another option is having them as standard dependencies, and excluding them when building the production artifact via a production profile. You can check how this second option can be implemented by inspecting this pom.xml example.
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We would like to make all this extra configuration go away and offer the same no-config experience we offer for Gradle projects also for Maven projects. If you’d like to help us reach that goal, please let us know. We’d appreciate any contribution! |
Sharing Dev Services
Dev Services can be shared across applications, allowing you to reuse the same service across multiple applications. For example, you can share the RabbitMQ Dev Service and use it for exchanging messages between applications during development. Refer to the documentation of each Dev Service to check if it is shared by default and when. There are three options:
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never: The service is never shared across applications. -
dev-mode: The service is shared across applications only if the application is running in dev mode. -
always: The service is always shared across applications when enabled (dev and test mode).
This capability relies on the Reusable Containers feature of Testcontainers, which is disabled by default. You can enable it in the ~/.testcontainers.properties file in your home directory. If the file does not exist, you can create it. It should contain the following line:
testcontainers.reuse.enable=trueArconia Dev Services vs. Spring Boot Testcontainers Support
You can think of the Arconia Dev Services as a higher-level feature built on top of Spring Boot’s support for Testcontainers. The goal is to provide a seamless developer experience by automatically starting the services your application depends on without any additional code or configuration.
Arconia Dev Services are also transparent to the developer, meaning that you don’t need to change your development workflow to use them. Unlike the lower-level Testcontainers support in Spring Boot, Arconia doesn’t require special tasks to run your application when using Dev Services (./gradlew bootTestRun or ./mvnw spring-boot:test-run) nor requires you to define a separate @SpringBootApplication class for configuring Testcontainers. Instead, it lets you run your application via the usual tasks provided by the Spring Boot plugins for Gradle or Maven, or using the Arconia CLI.
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CLI
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Gradle
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Maven
arconia dev./gradlew bootRun./mvnw spring-boot:runYour integration tests will also automatically use the Arconia Dev Services without any additional configuration.