dotfiles VS ci

I can’t help specifically with running on an M1/M2, but for macos testing of my dotfiles, I run a very nifty docker container that spins up a qemu vm with a real macos install - it’s not perfect, but it’s a very good approximation of what install on a macos device would be like. My dotfiles, including my containerized testing environments for both mac and linux are open source, and here’s a direct link to the macos docker compose definition: https://github.com/andrewbrey/dotfiles/tree/main/.devcontainer/mac

Use a vscode devcontainer for your local development. This devcontainer has all of your tooling inside it. You maintain it, you control what versions of libraries and tools it has. This devcontainer should also be able to deploy the app/infrastructure so your developers can work in their sandbox. Then.....in your yaml (ghactions/azdo) all you do is build your devcontainer and run the commands inside your container. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/devcontainer-cli. This way, your yaml is simple and your complicated build/deploy logic is kept alongside the code. What works on your local machine, truly works in your build.... Here are the build tasks https://github.com/devcontainers/ci

Atop of the CLI, there is CI tooling for GitHub Actions. This means you can use the same development container as your CI/CD environment.

As far as testing goes and if you use GitHub Actions, there is a devcontainers/ci project that let's you run tests inside of the devcontainer that can help reduce the redundancy/drift between what you develop in and test with.