Offline dev story about l1-node

[DiegoRBaquero]

@juliangruber triaging issues, can we close this one?

[juliangruber]

I ran ./node build once to cover the initial setup cost, then I switched to tethering to simulate slow internet, then ran it again to measured the iteration speed:

./node build  0.26s user 0.16s system 8% cpu 4.799 total

5s is by no means terrible, but also not great. Depending on the internet speed it, would be awesome if it could build without making any network requests.

[DiegoRBaquero]

This is mostly decided by docker itself and its caching. If there's a new image then everything gets rebuilt. You'd need a pass-through cache registry that works offline. What are you trying to test offline? You can run the shim totally offline if you have the npm dependencies installed.

[juliangruber]

I was working on the L1 at that time, being on slow internet was a side effect, I didn't mean to test it specifically. Running the shim is half the story, because quite a lot of logic lives inside nginx.

[DiegoRBaquero]

@juliangruber this is really up to docker, you can't force it offline, how would you like to proceed with this issue?

[juliangruber]

Let's close it for now, since there are other far more important issues.

Just thinking out loud, it could help if you can build docker images without fetching any dependencies from the internet, and only updating what you changed locally