Documentation for recommendations on how to test ActivityPub functionality?

[Patrick O'Connor]

Hey @ckolderup 👋

I spent the past couple days off and on trying to test/debug #72 but I'm having a hard time. I started by creating a test instance on glitch and making changes there. I wanted more control over what mastodon was doing and postmarks though. So I tried getting Mastodon running locally, (which eventually worked using vagrant), but then I started running into http vs. https issues 🤣

Anyway, do you have any recommendations for how we can test these interactions? Maybe a real Mastodon instance and Postmarks on Glitch is the best way? Including this topic in #68 might be helpful too?

Thanks!

[Casey Kolderup]

Hey! I appreciate you calling this out; I know I'm overdue on #68-- I added a bullet point to that to reflect that we should definitely try to put together some suggestions & pitfalls about testing this kind of stuff. I've definitely done my testing against live Mastodon servers, but agree that it can be hard, especially if you don't have an instance that you've deployed yourself and thus access to server logs/the job queue/etc.

I'll try to get something about what I've done so far onto the wiki so that we can build on it from there and link to it in the CONTRIBUTING.md that I will make my own next contribution.