testcontainers/testcontainers-java · warning

Your provided admin password is too short and will not work…

Error message

Your provided admin password is too short and will not work with Neo4j 5.3+.

What it means

Neo4jContainer.withAdminPassword warns when the provided admin password is shorter than 8 characters, because Neo4j 5.3+ enforces a minimum password length of 8 and would reject the container's attempt to set it, failing startup or authentication. The value is still stored and applied, so with older Neo4j images a short password continues to work — the warning is version-specific.

Solutions

1. Provide a password of at least 8 characters, e.g. withAdminPassword("s3cretpassword")
2. Call withRandomPassword() instead of a fixed short password and read the password via getAdminPassword()
3. Pin the image to a pre-5.3 Neo4j version if a legacy short password must be kept (not recommended)

Example fix

// before
neo4j.withAdminPassword("secret"); // 6 chars
// after
neo4j.withRandomPassword();
String pwd = neo4j.getAdminPassword();

String pwd = "secret1"; // example
if (pwd != null && pwd.length() < 8) {
    throw new IllegalArgumentException("Neo4j 5.3+ requires admin password >= 8 chars");
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling withAdminPassword("short") (length < 8) on a Neo4jContainer running a Neo4j 5.3+ image; also reachable indirectly through withoutAuthentication(null is fine, no warning) but any non-null <8-char string triggers it.

Common situations: Using trivial test passwords like 'secret' or 'admin' while the image was upgraded from Neo4j 4.x/5.0-5.2 to 5.3+; hard-coded credentials in test config.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Must be a positive integer", "Invalid value", "Unsupported": the invalid-argument-value error family, when a library rejects the value you pass — this error's family across 35 libraries.

Related errors

• Version is not a semantic version. The function…
• Copying databases is only supported for Neo4j versions 3.5.x
• Authentication failed.
• HTTP response code was
• Response: did not match predicate

AI-assisted analysis of testcontainers/testcontainers-java@8e549514e3 (2026-09-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/c2c527f2d1cd84bf. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at modules/neo4j/src/main/java/org/testcontainers/containers/Neo4jContainer.java:244

        setDockerImageName(DEFAULT_IMAGE_NAME.withTag(ENTERPRISE_TAG).asCanonicalNameString());
        LicenseAcceptance.assertLicenseAccepted(getDockerImageName());

        addEnv("NEO4J_ACCEPT_LICENSE_AGREEMENT", "yes");

        return self();
    }

    /**
     * Sets the admin password for the default account (which is <pre>neo4j</pre>). A null value or an empty string
     * disables authentication.
     *
     * @param adminPassword The admin password for the default database account.
     * @return This container.
     */
    public S withAdminPassword(final String adminPassword) {
        if (adminPassword != null && adminPassword.length() < 8) {
            logger().warn("Your provided admin password is too short and will not work with Neo4j 5.3+.");
        }
        this.adminPassword = adminPassword;
        return self();
    }

    /**
     * Disables authentication.
     *
     * @return This container.
     */
    public S withoutAuthentication() {
        return withAdminPassword(null);
    }

    /**
     * Copies an existing {@code graph.db} folder into the container. This can either be a classpath resource or a
     * host resource. Please have a look at the factory methods in {@link MountableFile}.
     * <br>

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