cache

This action allows caching dependencies and build outputs to improve workflow execution time.

Documentation

See "Caching dependencies to speed up workflows".

What's New

v3

• Added support for caching from GHES 3.5.
• Fixed download issue for files > 2GB during restore.
• Updated the minimum runner version support from node 12 -> node 16.
• Fixed avoiding empty cache save when no files are available for caching.
• Fixed tar creation error while trying to create tar with path as
  ~/
  home folder on
  ubuntu-latest
  .
• Fixed zstd failing on amazon linux 2.0 runners.
• Fixed cache not working with github workspace directory or current directory.
• Fixed the download stuck problem by introducing a timeout of 1 hour for cache downloads.
• Fix zstd not working for windows on gnu tar in issues.
• Allowing users to provide a custom timeout as input for aborting download of a cache segment using an environment variable
  SEGMENT_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT_MINS
  . Default is 60 minutes.

Refer here for previous versions

Usage

Pre-requisites

Create a workflow

If you are using this inside a container, a POSIX-compliant

Inputs

• path
  - A list of files, directories, and wildcard patterns to cache and restore. See
  @actions/glob
  for supported patterns.
• key
  - An explicit key for restoring and saving the cache
• restore-keys
  - An ordered list of prefix-matched keys to use for restoring stale cache if no cache hit occurred for key.

Environment Variables

• SEGMENT_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT_MINS
  - Segment download timeout (in minutes, default
  60
  ) to abort download of the segment if not completed in the defined number of minutes. Read more

Outputs

• cache-hit
  - A boolean value to indicate an exact match was found for the key.

Note:

cache-hit

will be set to

true

only when cache hit occurs for the exact

key

match. For a partial key match via

restore-keys

or a cache miss, it will be set to

false

.

See Skipping steps based on cache-hit for info on using this output

Cache scopes

The cache is scoped to the key, version and branch. The default branch cache is available to other branches.

See Matching a cache key for more info.

Example workflow

Note: You must use the

cache

action in your workflow before you need to use the files that might be restored from the cache. If the provided

key

matches an existing cache, a new cache is not created and if the provided

key

doesn't match an existing cache, a new cache is automatically created provided the job completes successfully.

Implementation Examples

Every programming language and framework has its own way of caching.

See Examples for a list of

• C# - NuGet
• Clojure - Lein Deps
• D - DUB
• Deno
• Elixir - Mix
• Go - Modules
• Haskell - Cabal
• Haskell - Stack
• Java - Gradle
• Java - Maven
• Node - npm
• Node - Lerna
• Node - Yarn
• OCaml/Reason - esy
• PHP - Composer
• Python - pip
• Python - pipenv
• R - renv
• Ruby - Bundler
• Rust - Cargo
• Scala - SBT
• Swift, Objective-C - Carthage
• Swift, Objective-C - CocoaPods
• Swift - Swift Package Manager

Creating a cache key

A cache key can include any of the contexts, functions, literals, and operators supported by GitHub Actions.

For example, using the

Additionally, you can use arbitrary command output in a cache key, such as a date or software version:

See Using contexts to create cache keys

Cache Limits

A repository can have up to 10GB of caches. Once the 10GB limit is reached, older caches will be evicted based on when the cache was last accessed. Caches that are not accessed within the last week will also be evicted.

Skipping steps based on cache-hit

Using the

Example:

Note: The

id

defined in

actions/cache

must match the

id

in the

if

statement (i.e.

steps.[ID].outputs.cache-hit

)

Cache Version

Cache version is a hash generated for a combination of compression tool used (Gzip, Zstd, etc. based on the runner OS) and the

Pro tip: List caches API can be used to get the version of a cache. This can be helpful to troubleshoot cache miss due to version.

Known practices and workarounds

Following are some of the known practices/workarounds which community has used to fulfill specific requirements. You may choose to use them if suits your use case. Note these are not necessarily the only or the recommended solution.

• Cache segment restore timeout
• Update a cache
• Use cache across feature branches
• Improving cache restore performance on Windows/Using cross-os caching
• Force deletion of caches overriding default cache eviction policy

Windows environment variables

Please note that Windows environment variables (like

Contributing

We would love for you to contribute to

License

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License