Test environment for bitcoin transactions/wallets I want to build a pet project which would use bitcoin for sending/receiving and see balance of wallets involved changed.
What are my options for having a local env that would allow me to perform these operations in a way similar to real environment?
Bitcoin Core and all implementations of Bitcoin should provide developers with a local regtest mode which is local only (no peers) and a mining difficulty of 0. This is the mode most tests are written in because blocks can be mined instantly.
Since you tagged nodejs you might be interested in bcoin:
https://bcoin.io
https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin