WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46615502

(no title)

ufo | 1 month ago

How do you handle persistent state in your actions?

For my actions, the part that takes the longest to run is installing all the dependencies from scratch. I'd like to speed that up but I could never figure it out. All the options I could find for caching deps sounded so complicated.

discuss

order

embedding-shape|1 month ago

> How do you handle persistent state in your actions?

You shouldn't. Besides caching that is.

> All the options I could find for caching deps sounded so complicated.

In reality, it's fairly simple, as long as you leverage content-hashing. First, take your lock file, compute the sha256sum. Then check if the cache has an artifact with that hash as the ID. If it's found, download and extract, those are your dependencies. If not, you run the installation of the dependencies, then archive the results, with the ID set to the hash.

It really isn't more to it. I'm sure there are helpers/sub-actions/whatever Microsoft calls it, for doing all of this with 1-3 lines or something.

ufo|1 month ago

The tricky bit for me was figuring out which cache to use, and how to use and test it locally. Do you use the proprietary github actions stuff? If the installation process inside the actions runner is different from what we use in the developer machines, now we have two sets of scripts and it's harder to test and debug...

philipp-gayret|1 month ago

Depends on the build toolchain but usually you'd hash the dependency file and that hash is your cache key for a folder in which you keep your dependencies. You can also make a Docker image containing all your dependencies but usually downloading and spinning that up will take as long as installing the dependencies.

For caching you use GitHubs own cache action.

1a527dd5|1 month ago

You don't.

For things like installing deps, you can use GitHub Actions or several third party runners have their own caching capabilities that are more mature than what GHA offers.