Persist the Silverstripe CMS Gatsby Cache Between Builds

Persist the Silverstripe CMS Gatsby cache between Netlify builds to take advantage of hard cached uploaded files.

For use in conjuction with netlify-plugin-gatsby-cache.

Usage

You can install this plugin manually using netlify.toml. If you want to know more about file-based configuration on Netlify, click here.

Add the following lines to your project's netlify.toml file:

[build]
  publish = "public"

[[plugins]]
  package = "netlify-plugin-gatsby-cache"

[[plugins]]
  package = "netlify-plugin-silverstripe-cache"

Note: The [[plugins]] line is required for each plugin, even if you have other plugins in your netlify.toml file already.

Why do I need this?

While the standard netlify-plugin-gatsby-cache is great for persisting data and assets between builds, clearing the cache results in a loss of all your downloaded files. For many sites, these files can exceed multiple gigabytes, resulting in very long build times on an empty cache.

Because unlikely that once a file is downloaded it would need to be deleted, downloaded assets in the gatsby-source-silverstripe plugin can be given special instructions to be stored outside the Gatsby cache folder, making them resillient against standard cache invalidation.

This feature, known as "hard caching" is enabled by default with the hardCacheAssets flag in the source plugin. It reconciles the .silverstripe-cache folder with the synced data on every build, meaning that adding, deleting, or updating files will result in a parallel update to the hard cache directory.

None of this works, however, if we don't tell Netlify to protect this folder between builds.

How does it work?

This plugin determines the location of your .silverstripe-cache folder by looking at the publish folder configured for Netlify deployment. This means that if your Gatsby site successfully deploys, it will be cached as well with no config required! 🎉

Want to learn how to create your own Netlify Build Plugins?

Check out Sarah Drasner’s excellent tutorial!