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Comment by benesch | Hacker News Reader

> in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.

I've never seen a hard block on network access (how do you install packages/pull images?) but I am sympathetic to wanting to enforce that unit tests run quickly by minimizing/eliminating RTT to networked services.

We've considered the possibility of a local simulator before. Let me know if it winds up being a blocker for your use case.

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> how do you install packages/pull images

You pre-build the images with packages installed beforehand, then use those image offline.

My point is it's enough of a hassle to set up that I've yet to see that level of restriction in practice (across hundreds of CI systems).

Look into Bazel, a very standard build system used at many large tech companies. It splits fetches from build/test actions and allows blocking network for build/test actions with a single CLI flag. No hassle at all.

The fact that you haven't come across this kind of setup suggests that your hundreds of CI systems are not representative of the industry as a whole.

I agree our sample may not be representative but we try to stay focused on the current and next crop of tpuf customers rather than the software industry as a whole. So far "CI prohibits network access during tests" just hasn't come up as a pain point for any of them, but as I mentioned in another comment [0], we're definitely keeping an open mind about introducing an offline dev experience.

(I am familiar with Bazel, but I'll have to save the war stories for another thread. It's not a build tool we see our particular customers using.)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758156

you pull packages from a trusted package repository, not from the internet. this is not rare in my experience (financial services, security) and will become increasingly common due to software supply chain issues.

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