Ability to Test NIC Against In-Development Builds of NGINX, Agent, and F5 WAF

[AlexFenlon]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
There is currently no streamlined way to test NIC against in-development versions of dependencies, including:

• NGINX
• NGINX Agent
• F5 WAF

While some components can be built and run locally, the workflows are manual, undocumented, and not automated. This makes it difficult to validate integration changes early and increases the likelihood of discovering issues only after official releases.

Describe the solution you'd like
A workflow or tooling that allows NIC to be tested against experimental / main / preview builds of:

• NGINX
• NGINX Agent
• F5 WAF

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Manually building Agent, NGINX, or WAF from source and testing NIC with them. This is possible but slow, inconsistent, and hard to reproduce.
• Only testing NIC against released versions. This delays integration feedback and can allow breakages to slip through until later in release cycles.

Additional context
This request aligns with the broader goal of being able to test NIC across all core internal dependencies while they are still under development, rather than only after release. This would help us detect and resolve regressions earlier.

[github-actions]

Hi @AlexFenlon thanks for reporting!

Be sure to check out the docs and the Contributing Guidelines while you wait for a human to take a look at this 🙂

Cheers!