[gitgud]

If I understand the question correctly, you’d like to build a networked system entirely on a single machine.

If this is the case, then I’d recommend trying docker-compose. It’s quite an easy little system to get up and running, just need a single file to declare different containers and their relationships. Then just run “docker-compose up/down” to spin up and spin down the network.

The beauty of this is that it can run on extremely barebones Linux distributions, as it’s all container based.

It’s a great starting point anyway, and I’m sure there’s many alternatives now that use a similar api