DevOps: Provide ODK Central in devcontainer and GH actions

[florianm]

Feature

To replace the need for a hosted ODK Central instance for ruODK testing (both local dev and GH actions), it would be nice to run ODK Central in a devcontainer.

This would need to setups: one for local dev (mounting the application code as main service) and one for Gh actions (only running the ODK Central containers).

A working example has been implemented for R package ckanr (which needs a running CKAN instance).

Challenges: Provision SSL certificates for the respective hostname. In the devcontainer, accessing ODK Central via the Codespaces hostname may collide with the Codespaces SSL tunnelling.

References

Run ODK Central on GH Actions, check hostname and get SSL cert:
https://github.com/getodk/central/blob/next/.github/workflows/test.yml
https://github.com/getodk/central/blob/next/test/test-images.sh

Integration R package vs microservices docker compose: https://github.com/ropensci/ckanr/tree/main/.devcontainer

[lognaturel]

@alxndrsn I wonder whether you might have some quick advice on this given some of the integration testing you've built. I think it's worth considering a pared down Central (e.g. just backend)

[alxndrsn]

@lognaturel 👍 there are a few examples that might be relevant:

It looks like odk-central-frontend runs the full central service for e2e tests: https://github.com/getodk/central-frontend/blob/master/.github/workflows/tests.yml#L28-L47

odk-central-backend e2e tests clone the central repo (as normal - with actions/checkout@v4), and then run central alone with make run:

• https://github.com/getodk/central-backend/blob/master/test/e2e/standard/run-tests.sh#L25
• https://github.com/getodk/central-backend/blob/master/test/e2e/s3/run-tests.sh#L56
• https://github.com/getodk/central-backend/blob/master/test/e2e/oidc/run-tests.sh#L28

Edit: maybe the last is most interesting, as it runs various services with SSL/TLS.

In the odk-central repo, there are a few tests which run services with HTTPS, but none actually running odk-central-backend.