Running docker container for a test

I have an application with nodejs and R code. The last one runs in a Docker container.

I am planning some end-2-end tests, where I need to have the docker containers running. The service inside the container is stateful, so I would need to restart it for each test (for instance in beforeEach).

I would like to know what is the common way of doing this. I was thinking of executing an external command from the code in nodejs. Somethink like exec(docker run ...), but I don't know whether it is correct and elegant.

Any help is welcome