Properly stop / clean / dispose

[lonix1]

I'm trying to understand how to properly dispose a container.

I use container.StopAsync(), and in my class' disposal code I call container.DisposeAsync().

I checked the source for DisposeAsync and saw that it calls CleanUpAsync or StopAsync.

How do those differ? And should I be using WithCleanUp(true)?

[HofmeisterAn]

• StopAsync will just stop the container. All ressources remain. You can start the container in the same .NET Testcontainers run again.
• CleanUpAsync will remove the container resource. Be aware of #242. We did some further improvements, but there are edge cases where we are not able to remove the container resource yet. Anyway, if you setup a proper test, most cases will work.
• DisposeAsync chooses between these too implementations, it depends on whether you set WithCleanUp or not. By default, it is set to true.

It is not necessary to call StopAsync or CleanUpAsync if you are using the await using pattern. DisposeAsync helps to reduce the cleanup code. Usually, you set WithCleanUp to false to debug and inspect your container while developing.

[lonix1]

That clears up my confusion, thank you very much! I'm sure others will benefit also from this detail.

[lonix1]

This seems to be the way to think of it, kind of:

StartAsync() == docker run image
StopAsync() == docker stop container
CleanAsync() == docker rm container
DisposeAsync() == docker stop container; docker rm container

[SeanFarrow]

This was helpful, thanks.

however I'm finding that images are not deleted.

I have both Cleanup and Remove set to true.

With is with a mssql container.

[evaapavel]

Well, I think, with Docker, there are images and there are containers. You usually do not want to delete an image (sort of a startup snapshot for your containers, you initially download it from a web repository) whereas you may want to delete a container (sort of a "used" snapshot of a virtual machine you want to get rid of after a couple of tests).