Split out puppeteer's install to be acquired separately to the rest of the modules

[Tyriar]

It downloads Chromium which means is busts the GH Actions cache if we try to cache node_modules and also takes a long time to install locally and in CI. We should move it out and only install it when we need the API tests (cd test/api && yarn? "pretest-api": "npm install puppeteer"?).

[leomoty]

How about using a container for testing the API (like we do in devcontainer?).

With PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD, you'd skip downloading chromium binaries within node_modules. But iirc, would require to explicitly set the executablePath in puppeteer call.

[Tyriar]

Well this is mainly about just speeding up the compile/unit test job, which already gets run in containers. A perk is that it would also lower the startup time for new people. It makes sense to just avoid installing puppeteer unless you need to actually run the API tests, I don't think we should require someone to have docker to run them though.

[leomoty]

I meant more like PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD as an env var would only default for CI. So locally it should still download puppeteer. And could just check the same env var to set explicitly the binary or not.

[Tyriar]

👍 seems like the easiest fix: #2541

[leomoty]

That is what I meant, sorry for "missing the point" first :)

Edit:
I didn't know you wanted to speed up the non-API times