It looks like component releases is mostly targeted to chrome browser plugins, doesn't seem like a great fit for our use case.

This script https://goto.google.com/servod was another option. It's ruled out as it immediately fails on moblab, requires apt-get.

I found some promising design docs and bugs from about 2 years ago. There was some discussion along these same lines for the lab/moblab. They ended up not implementing anything, but the idea is to just copy the entire servod directory and push it into tests as a server side package. We could do something similar. Some challenges would be getting around the read only partition that servod is in, how to pull updates/check for updates, how to tell tests to start servod from the new location.

It was abandoned because they didn't need it in the lab. There was mixed opinion on the value to moblab, with upfront development cost vs many hours of manual QA could be saved.

Relevant links:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U8GpGIMh0qIxfNfCD6DoCwRMBb7ROQ-w2Mve4SDtoEU/edit#
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=507423