Understanding how cache works

GitLab CI/CD
, ,
1

I am trying to understand how caching works with gitlab jobs.

  1. How do i know for sure that caching is being utilized for jobs? It says " Successfully extracted cache" but the build time is slower than I would expect
  2. Is using a local cache the fastest way to using the cache? Faster than s3?

We are using a docker based runner with /cache as the cache directory

We have a simple next.js project and this is the current ci file


485 B

deploy:

  image: node:20-alpine

  stage: deploy

  cache:

    - key:

        files:

          - yarn.lock

      paths:

        - .yarn-cache/

    - key: ${CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG}

      paths:

        - .next/cache/

  script:

    - "pwd"

    - "ls -lah"

    - "ls -lah .yarn-cache ||:"

    - "ls -lah .next/cache ||:"

    - yarn install --frozen-lockfile --no-progress

    - yarn build

    - yarn wrangler pages deploy out --project-name "test-app" --branch $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH

  when: manual

It’s taking quite a while to build this job and it seems like it should be a alot quicker.

Looking for the cache in the cache directory during the pipelin returns this

$ ls -lah .yarn-cache ||:
ls: .yarn-cache: No such file or directory
$ ls -lah .next/cache ||:
ls: .next/cache: No such file or directory

Does this mean that it can’t find the cache inside the docker container?