Gitea `act_runner` with `actions/cache@v4` approach notes

Within my homelab I have Gitea up and running. As usual there are a lot of dependencies to install! Turns out speeds are faster from the Internet than the cache mechanism but it conflicts with other traffic and consumes the bandwidth cap. I am guessing Github’s CDN has a close node to my location. A problem I will have to look into later; perhaps the cache can be mounted on a RAM disk to make it faster.

actions/cache versus {actions/cache/save, actions/cache/restore}

Although convenient to specify a cache via a single action such as actions/cache, was never quiet sure if the action was the restore point and would pickup artifacts at the end, or if it was restoring. From the documentation it is a restore then save which makes sense. However with Gitea there was a lot of jankiness with the runner claiming the files were missing. Given these are transformative operations it feels better to declare when we are retrieving then restoring anyway.

Using save and `restore

The following successfully archives saving the hugo.deb file between runs. Reduces the total runtime by 1 second which is meh however it does reduce bandwidth usage by at least 20MBs per run!

name: Caching Example
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

defaults:
  run:
    shell: bash
jobs:
  # Build job
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      HUGO_VERSION: 0.124.0
    steps:
      - uses: actions/cache/restore@v4.0.2
        name:  Restore Hugo cache
        id: cache-hugo
        with:
          path: |
            ${{github.workspace}}/hugo.deb            
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-hugo-deb-${{env.HUGO_VERSION}}
      - name: Download Hugo CLI
        if: steps.cache-hugo.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
        run: wget --no-verbose -O ${{ github.workspace}}/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.deb
      - uses: actions/cache/save@v4.0.2
        name:  Cache Hugo
        if: steps.cache-hugo.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
        with:
          path: ${{github.workspace}}/hugo.deb
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-hugo-deb-${{env.HUGO_VERSION}}
          save-always: true
      - name: Install Hugo CLI
        run:
          dpkg -i ${{ github.workspace }}/hugo.deb
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          submodules: recursive
          fetch-depth: 0

Future Problems

• act_runner cache’s performance is fairly bad. I need to explore how to improve performance.
• Figure out how to better use actions/cache.