Allow consistency check to run offline (in CI)

[gforcada]

batou is extra nice that one does not have to blindly run batou deploy XX and pray that all works out 🙏🏾

Instead one has the -P to predict and -c to check the consistency of an environment 💫

It would be great that one could run ./batou deploy -c XX on a CI environment, so that, at least a minimal check that the changes on a PR are more or less valid.

It would not be 100% accurate as the secrets would not be loaded, and most probably the connection to the servers either, but as a minimal safety net to ensure that at least the models are consistent would be nice 😄

[elikoga]

What should be the semantics of running the consistency check offline? Currently, we are executing the consistency check by executing the configure methods of the components on the target systems. According to batou's declarative nature, this should be fine to run on any other host, but since access to host systems is currently given, some components or deployments might not be able to run the consistency check on the local environment.

[gforcada]

Uh, sorry, I missed this notification.

Oh, I see, about running configure on the target system... As said on the issue title, my wish would be to be able to run the consistency check in CI, mostly to notice if a new commit/PR breaks an environment.

This way, you get early feedback, even before deploying to a test environment.

Now that I think of, the secrets file would also be problematic...

Ideally, as you say about batou's declarative nature, running it on GitHub/GitLab CI environment should possible, right?

If a fake host system would be possible, that would be a first step towards this idea of mine.

[zagy]

There is a bug: the local mode still tries to provision the dev VMs.

#  ./batou deploy -cL dev  
batou/2.6.0a1 (cpython 3.10.16-final0, Darwin 24.2.0 arm64)
==================================================================================================== Preparing ====================================================================================================
main: Loading environment `dev`...
main: Verifying repository ...
main: Loading secrets ...
============================================================================================= Provisioning hosts ... ==============================================================================================
4ae753fe: Provisioning with `default` provisioner.
    Including environments/dev/provision.sh
    Including environments/dev/provision.nix
=================================================================================== Connecting hosts and configuring model ... ====================================================================================
4ae753fe: Connecting via local (1/1)