Generally I started playing with Concourse CI for a few days and found it to be a great server for automation for my private projects. In this post I will describe how to speed up npm install.
Concourse has a built-in directory caching system from our workspace. Just add directories to the task configuration in the caches: field.
build.yml
---
platform: linux
image_resource:
type: docker-image
source: { repository: node, tag: 12 }
inputs:
- name: game-repo
run:
path: game-repo/ci/tasks/build.sh
caches:
- path: .npm
- path: game-repo/node_modules
In our case it will be the .npm and node_modules directory. By default, npm stores the cache in ~/.npm which for Concourse means /root/.npm. And here a problem arises, because Concourse can only cache files and folders from a workspace that may have a different path e.g: /tmp/23f2d2/build/.
Below is an example script with a changed cache path to /tmp/23f2d2/build/.npm.
build.sh
#!/bin/sh
set -eux
npm config set cache $(pwd)/.npm --global
npm install -g npm
cd game-repo
npm install --unsafe-perm
npm run build
After such an operation, we can be sure that the next tasks will have the preserved packages from previous builds.