There are some tests (integration, end to end, component…) in most modern test suites that rely on some external resources in order to run. Confusing industry terminology aside, their goal is to test the integration between some part of our application and the outside world, like a database or a queue or even some other team’s application.

This is often accomplished by having a Docker container pretend to be the external entity we wish to mock – which is easy enough to set up in a developer’s laptop:

However, things get a bit more tricky once the same test setup has to be run in the team’s CI pipeline.

The reason being, a lot of modern CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GoCD etc. rely on their build agents being Docker containers themselves.

This presents developers who wish to run integration tests in their CI with the task of spawning Docker containers from within other Docker containers, which is not trivial as we are about to see.