Whats the best way to cache a CLI?

[SpencerKaiser]

Part of my action uses the IBM Cloud CLI (ibmcloud) and it takes forever to install, so I'd like to cache it. I tried to use which to figure out where the executables were going, but I've run into a few snags...

Here's what I have so far within my job (should refresh the cache at the start of each week):

- name: Get CLI Cache Key
  id: get-cache-key
  run: |
    echo "::set-output name=cache-key::$(/bin/date -u "+%Y%U")"
  shell: bash

- uses: actions/cache@v2
  id: cache
  with:
    path: |
      /home/runner/.bluemix
      /usr/local/bin/ibmcloud
      /usr/bin/kubectl
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ steps.get-cache-key.outputs.cache-key }} # CLI cache becomes stale every week

When I run this Action, however, I get the following error:

Run actions/cache@v2
Received 20034758 of 20034758 (100.0%), 52.5 MBs/sec
Cache Size: ~19 MB (20034758 B)
/bin/tar --use-compress-program zstd -d -xf /home/runner/work/_temp/****-****-****/cache.tzst -P -C /home/runner/work/****/****
/bin/tar: ../../../../../usr/local/bin/ibmcloud: Cannot create symlink to ‘/usr/local/ibmcloud/bin/ibmcloud’: Permission denied
/bin/tar: ../../../../../usr/bin/kubectl: Cannot open: File exists
/bin/tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
[warning]Tar failed with error: The process '/bin/tar' failed with exit code 2

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong or how this could be improved?

[dhadka]

Something to try is changing the installation path to somewhere in the working directory. That should help avoid permission issues. See https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cli?topic=cli-install-ibmcloud-cli#install-custom-dir

[dhadka]

Yeah, seems like kubectl can be setup similarly - https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/#install-kubectl-on-linux

[SpencerKaiser]

I just realized the one downside to this pattern is that it's version locked 😔 I had a cache key setup where the cache would expire every week but with this pattern I'd need to make a change to the workflow to update them. On the upside the cache would last longer...

[SpencerKaiser]

So I guess that's one tiny feature request I'd make for Actions: I would love to be able to cache system directories within the runners. Ideally when installing a package or something, I'd be able to cache it wherever it's located instead of only at the working directory

[SpencerKaiser]

@dhadka I ended up bailing on the idea; it seems too difficult to cache the CLI with plugins (I can't even figure out how to install the plugins to a custom directory anyways), but I'm going to mark your answer as correct since you solved the original problem of caching the CLI on it's own.

For the future, I would love to see GitHub provide the ability to cache non-working directory files to make things easier for the end user 🙂

[kaczmarj]

@dhadka - thank you very much, your answer clears things up. for others reading and looking at the code examples, add-path has been deprecated in favor of writing paths to $GITHUB_PATH. See the documentation.

- echo "::add-path::$(pwd)/IBM_Cloud_CLI"
+ echo "$(pwd)/IBM_Cloud_CLI" >> $GITHUB_PATH

[samus-aran]

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