Stash provides a solution for managing large build caches in your workflows, that doesn't require any secrets and can be used in fork PRs. It's designed as an alternative to actions/cache which struggles with big build caches such as .ccache directories. This action is split into two distinct operations: assign/user/restore for fetching a previously stored stash, and assignUser/stash/save for storing a new stash after a build has been completed.
- No repository wide size limit of 10GB each stash is uploaded as a workflow artifact.
- This means there will be no cache evicition leading to cache misses and increased build times. Stashes will expire after 5 days by default.
- Artifact storage is free for public repositories and much cheaper than CI minutes (~ 1 Cent/1GB/day) for private repositories.
- No secrets required, stash can be used in fork PRs.
- Follows the same search scope as
actions/cache: will look for the cache in the current workflow, current branch and finally the base branch of a PR.
Important
You have to explicitly save your stash by using assignUser/stash/save action, it will not be saved automatically by using assignUser/stash/restore.
To restore a stash before your build process, use the assignUser/stash/restore action in your workflow:
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: assignUser/stash/restore@v1
with:
key: 'cache-key'
path: 'path/to/cache'After your build completes, save the stash using the assignUser/stash/save action:
steps:
- uses: assignUser/stash/save@v1
with:
key: 'cache-key'
path: 'path/to/cache'Stashes will expire after 5 days by default. You can set this from 1-90 days with the retention-days input. Using the save action again in the same workflow run will overwrite the existing cache with the same key. If you want to keep the old cache, you can use a different key or set overwrite to false.
Each action (restore and save) has specific inputs tailored to its functionality, they are specifically modeled after actions/cache and actions/upload-artifact to provide a drop in replacement. Please refer to the action metadata (action.yml) for a comprehensive list of inputs, including descriptions and default values.
Additionally the restore action has an output stash-hit which is set to true (as a string so use if: ${{ steps.restore-stash.outputs.stash-hit == 'true' }}!) if the cache was restored successfully, false if no cache was restored and '' if the action failed (an error will be thrown unless continue-on-error is set).
Contributions are welcome! If you'd like to contribute, please open an isse to discuss your plans (unless it's a typo ;)).