> Do you use the proprietary github actions stuff?

If I can avoid it, no. Almost everything I can control is outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. But as a freelancer, I have to deal a bunch with GitHub and Microsoft anyways, so in many of those cases, yes.

Many times, I end up using https://github.com/actions/cache for the clients who already use Actions, and none of that runs in the local machines at all.

Typically I use a single Makefile/Justfile, that sometimes have most of the logic inside of it for running tests and what not, sometimes shell out to "proper" scripts.

But that's disconnected from the required "setup", so Make/Just doesn't actually download dependencies, that's outside of the responsibilities of whatever runs the test.

And also, with a lot of languages, it doesn't matter if you run an extra "npm install" over already existing node_modules/, it'll figure out what's missing/there already, so you could in theory still have "make test" do absolute everything locally, including installing dependencies (if you now wish this), and still do the whole "hash > find cache > extract > continue" thing before running "make test", and it'll skip the dependencies part if it's there already.