Local testing of pyDataverse

[JR-1991]

In yesterday's community call about pyDataverse, a question was raised whether to supply a Dockerfile and instruction to run tests locally.

The current CI/CD pipeline already makes use of the containerised version of Dataverse and thus it may be worth looking into act which runs GitHub actions locally. I think, that by using the latter, we can make sure that local tests are carried out in exactly the same way as intended.

@pdurbin @poikilotherm and anyone who is interested, what are your thoughts?

[pdurbin]

My first thought is that I'm pretty sure @GPortas has used act and likes it. Also, as the primary maintainer of js-dataverse, he might be interested in something similar.

I don't know if you both plan to attend tomorrow's container meeting but we could certainly talk about it then (or a future meeting).

[GPortas]

@pdurbin I've tried act in the past, but ran into some issues and opted to use fork repositories to test actions instead. That is how I usually test actions and it works well for me.

We can talk more about it tomorrow at the ct meeting.

[JR-1991]

@GPortas thanks for the information! I was thinking about using act rather as a way to execute pyDataverse tests locally, but if you've had already issues I think it may not be perfectly suited as a general solution to this.

@pdurbin @poikilotherm would it make sense to put the procedure from the action into a shell script users can run to spin up an installation? Or should we rather advise to the quickstart guide?

[pdurbin]

Hmm, I'm interested in some sort of script or something to let people spin up Dataverse for evaluation purposes. I would like it to not required Java or Maven. Ideally, it would work on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

It should boil down to docker compose -f docker-compose-dev.yml up as explained at https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.1/container/dev-usage.html#running

I'm not sure if the action can help with this use case, but it's the first thing that comes to mind. No need to focus on this use case!

[JR-1991]

That would be the ideal case. The only thing that needs to be taken care of is to retrieve the API_Token and BASE_URL from within the containers. This is currently handled within the action.yml by parsing the exposed env:

grep "API_TOKEN" "${RUNNER_TEMP}/dv/bootstrap.exposed.env"

One possible solution could be to create an extended docker-compose-dev.yml file that would run all the tests. I will start working on a draft PR to see if this is feasible 🙌

[JR-1991]

@pdurbin added a pull request #172 using the docker compose approach 🙌