[SOLVED] Can drone cli run the build for the current project?

I’d like to test my builds without having to push to my CI server, for example to test changes to the drone.yml or simply to run my tests locally in the same environment.

I suppose drone exec should be able to do this, but how do I invoke it for this purpose? It seems to expect a rather large json payload.

Yes, yes it can. I was inadvertently using an outdated version of drone-cli. It all works fine now.