Container lifecycle management as Maven and Gradle plugins

In jOOQ, one of the most re-occurring ideas is that jOOQ should tightly couple Testcontainers, Flyway/Liquibase and jOOQ's code generation. See e.g. https://github.com/jOOQ/jOOQ/issues/6551

This coupling is obviously a bad idea, because the glue code is only a few lines of code, but to make it sufficiently configurable on behalf of all 3 involved products, we'd have to go through a lot of hassle. Much better if all 3 products could be configured completely independently in a CI/CD pipeline.

This is already possible for Flyway/Liquibase and jOOQ, both in Maven and Gradle, but I think it's not trivial to do for Testcontainers yet? What I'd love to see is to have Maven and Gradle plugins available that would allow for controlling the lifecycle of a test container instance in a build, for example (in pseudo-Maven):

<plugins>

  <!-- Start the database container -->
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>testcontainers-postgres-maven<artifactId>
    <phase>initialize</phase>
    <goal>start</goal>
  </plugin>

  <!-- Apply all schema migrations -->
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>flyway-maven<artifactId>
    <phase>initialize</phase>
  </plugin>

  <!-- Generate jOOQ sources -->
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>jooq-codegen-maven<artifactId>
    <phase>generate-sources</phase>
  </plugin>

  <!-- Stop the containers -->
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>testcontainers-postgres-maven<artifactId>
    <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
    <goal>stop</goal>
  </plugin>
</plugin>

I don't think Maven has an equivalent of Java's finally clause (i.e. a phase that runs at the end irrespective of how many phases were run), so if the post-integration-test phase isn't reached, then the containers won't stop, but that can be handled:

• E.g. they could stop at the latest when the build VM terminates (might be possible?)
• Gradle might not have this problem
• The start goal could reset the container first, if it is already running
• They could use Maven profiles for the whole thing and put all 4 plugin executions in there

There are many details to flesh out, but you get the idea. I think the sort of versatility this offers to highly generic, configurable builds would be yet another killer feature for testcontainers, not just for testing, but for CI/CD pipelines in general.

I've found an example project here, that does something like what I have in mind: https://github.com/squark-io/testcontainers-maven-plugin