If you want to do system tests in your service and need the datastore, use the dc.external.yml. It is completely independent from the local code. Just merge it with your service's docker compose file and you can test everything in conjunction. It uses the productive setup, so no hot reload or similar is used, but runs the datastore in dev mode, so dev utils like truncate_db (see below) are available. You have to add the reader/writer as a dependency to your service(s) and add them to the datastore network.
If the variable OPENSLIDES_DEVELOPMENT is set inside the docker container, the datastore runs in development mode. This is the case by default if you use the dc.dev.yml setup (see the environment section for the writer). Again, this currently has only an influence on the writer.
In development mode, all passwords (e.g. for the database) default to openslides.
In development mode, the route truncate_db is available in the writer. This will truncate the entire database and erase all data without confirmation, so use with caution. Example curl call:
curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" -d '' http://localhost:9011/internal/datastore/writer/truncate_db
Since the folder structure inside the docker container differs from the real one, IDEs like VS Code can't follow the imports correctly. To solve that, if you use VS Code, you need to create a .env file preferably in the .vscode folder (adjust your settings variable python.envFile accordingly) with the following entry:
PYTHONPATH=shared:reader:writer
Since docker compose uses the .env file in the root of the repository, this file should not also be used by VS Code, so it has to be placed elsewhere.
For other IDEs there are probably similar solutions. Feel free to add them here for your IDE.
See Locking.