Use of links between containers should be deprecated

[rnorth]

As discussed in #463, docker networks seem mature enough to use, and links are officially not recommended any more.

We'd like to deprecate use of links; off the top of my head I believe we ought to do the following things:

• Obviously, mark the container addLink method as deprecated with a clear comment
• Links aren't currently documented very well, but update the docs with a clear enough description of the networking support, so that ad-hoc linking can be done easily by users
• Modify Webdriver VNC recorder sidecar container to remove use of links
• Modify Docker Compose support; can we remove use of the ambassador container now?

[kiview]

I'm really looking forward to removing the ambassador container, I believe this will make things a lot easier in more complex CI environments.

[kiview]

AFAIK the only thing missing now is the documentation update?

[felixbarny]

I'd very much appreciate some docs around networks :)

[kiview]

@felixbarny Yep you are right, PR appreciated 😸

[bsideup]

@felixbarny yes, the docs are missing and I feel sorry about it (since I was the one who implemented the networks support)
However, it is as simple as .withNetwork(networkInstance) and until it is implemented you an check existing usages in tests, i.e. Kafka:

testcontainers-java/modules/kafka/src/test/java/org/testcontainers/containers/KafkaContainerTest.java

Lines 52 to 69 in b5181f7

	public void testExternalZookeeperWithExternalNetwork() throws Exception {
	try (
	Network network = Network.newNetwork();
	KafkaContainer kafka = new KafkaContainer()
	.withNetwork(network)
	.withExternalZookeeper("zookeeper:2181");
	GenericContainer zookeeper = new GenericContainer("confluentinc/cp-zookeeper:4.0.0")
	.withNetwork(network)
	.withNetworkAliases("zookeeper")
	.withEnv("ZOOKEEPER_CLIENT_PORT", "2181");
	) {
	Stream.of(kafka, zookeeper).parallel().forEach(GenericContainer::start);
	testKafkaFunctionality(kafka.getBootstrapServers());
	}
	}

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. If you believe this is a mistake, please reply to this comment to keep it open. If there isn't one already, a PR to fix or at least reproduce the problem in a test case will always help us get back on track to tackle this.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically closed due to inactivity. We apologise if this is still an active problem for you, and would ask you to re-open the issue if this is the case.

[rnorth]

Reopening - docs still needed