> As a Django dev I only just discovered the rest of the world has invented testcontainers, and databases as a solution for a problem Django solved years ago with its test database support.

Testing an API with model-bakery + pytest-django is absolutely joyous. As a TDD nerd, the lack of any remotely similar dev ex in FastAPI is the main reason I’ve never switched over.

As an aside, as someone who loves ergonomic testing, test containers are not the way. Dockerized services for testing are fine but their management is best done external to your test code. It is far easier to emulate prod by connecting to a general DB/service url that just happens to be running in a local container than have a special test harness that manages this internally to your test suite.