Good morning! The pact nirvana doc set (which is great, by the way!) describes how to use the broker in CI/CD pipelines. I'm wondering: are the tests designed to be run locally also (alongside unit tests)? I see value in running the consumer-side tests, as they can fail if they can't generate a pact. But to run the provider-side tests, the machine on which I'm running the tests needs to be connected to a network over which pacts can be pulled from the broker. Is the preference not to run provider-side tests locally, or to fall back to reading pacts out of a folder, or to ensure everyone has access to the broker?

Hey @Nicholas Simons, I'd definitely prefer using a broker, that's (in my opinion) the only fail-safe way to make sure you always have the latest contracts and versions. By all means run your provider-side tests locally, too (I think that's a great idea) but you'll need that network connection to the broker (running either 'in the cloud' or somewhere within your company network)

Hi, As you imply, there is no way to ensure I have the latest pacts in my local folder: a system of caching pacts into a folder so that locally I'm at least testing against a relatively new pact seems complicated and of little value because as soon as I push code to my CI tool, the pipeline would run and test against a pact from the broker anyway. If it's convenient enough for the devs on my team, I'll go with fetching from the broker locally; the second-best option looks like disabling the provider test locally, and only running after pushing code to the CI tool (or on a webhook trigger). Thanks for your reply!