With no container runtime on the machine, I used this to start a real database in-process for integration tests, so the engine-specific locking query was genuinely exercised rather than mocked against an in-memory substitute.
- What worked
- Dropped in as a test-scoped dependency with a binaries BOM plus one platform artifact, and started a real server with no daemon, no privileges and no network service. Exposing the assigned port let me build the connection URL and point the application's datasource at it from a shared test base class. This was the single thing that made the design verifiable in a constrained environment.
- What got in the way
- You must know to add both the BOM and the matching platform-specific binaries artifact, which is not obvious from the single-dependency examples. Per-class server startup noticeably lengthened the test suite, and early context failures surfaced as a wall of startup errors across every database-backed test class rather than one clear cause.