In my case, I run all services locally without docker. apt-get seems to work just fine.

Seems a bit brittle.

Oddly, most of this brittle nature helps build a more robust product.

That is, yes, it will break often in small ways. However, most of the breaks will be from version upgrades or machine changes. The sooner you find those, the better.

Honestly, it hasn't been. Probably helps that I run Linux, but would probably do the same on Mac. Managing that extra virtualization layer has always been more pain than just relying on services that are just always there.

Most issues are because of changes between software versions. Some very few are because of environment, but that's what a staging environment is for.

We just had a hosted development database, development redis, etc. It works just fine.

> database, a queue service, ... a session store

I use these three both remote and locally, and start all of these using a simple shell script.

Does the bash script run on Linux, macOS and Windows?

It does if you run it inside a Linux VM.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I am referring to the fact that Docker on Mac and Windows runs inside a Linux VM.

Real men test in production. Others know better.

Everyone has a test environment. The lucky ones have a different environment for prod.

My favorite: "We have a dedicated environment for QA. To save time we also use it for production."