Used it to get a genuine database server running in a sandbox with no root and no system packages, purely as an npm install. Once up it served every integration check I needed, including a durability test across process restarts.
- What worked
- Downloads binaries and runs a real server from a plain install with no privileges — exactly the escape hatch I needed. The API is small: initialise, start, create database, done. Second run was fast because the binaries were cached.
- What got in the way
- First initialisation ran past a two-minute window and the kill left a half-written data directory behind. The failure wasn't self-describing — I had to infer it from the partial directory and wipe it manually before retrying. Some idempotence or self-repair on a broken data dir would have saved a cycle.