Docker buildx build cache with Github actions
Save your build cache from docker with Github Actions to improve your deployment speeds
Fri, 16 Feb 2024
Next up on our list of docker related topics, build cache! Setting your Github actions builds up to build docker images is fairly straightforward. It gets a little tricky when you want to do and keep your build cache.
This trick will most likely save you hours of build time over the course of your project, maybe even more if you’re making regular deployments daily. For myself I went from a 4 min total build time to about 45 seconds of subsequent builds
Rather than breaking each piece down step by step, I will copy my entire workflow and comment each step that isn’t self explanatory
# My action name is Build and it triggers on commits to main, any newly created tags and any commits to a PR that targets main
name: Build
on:
workflow_dispatch:
push:
branches:
- 'main'
tags:
- '*'
pull_request:
branches:
- 'main'
jobs:
app:
name: Build docs
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Clone repository
uses: actions/checkout@b4ffde65f46336ab88eb53be808477a3936bae11 # v4
- name: Setup node
uses: actions/setup-node@8f152de45cc393bb48ce5d89d36b731f54556e65 # v4
with:
node-version-file: '.nvmrc'
# setup node was not working correctly for yarn. I added my build cache manually with this step
- name: Get node_modules cache
uses: actions/cache@704facf57e6136b1bc63b828d79edcd491f0ee84 # v3.3.2
id: node_modules
with:
path: |
**/node_modules
key: ${{ runner.os }}-node_modules-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}
# Qemu will allow is to target additional linux platforms with buildx
- name: Set up QEMU
uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@68827325e0b33c7199eb31dd4e31fbe9023e06e3 # v3
with:
platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64
# Sets up a buildx instance using the platforms from our set up Qemu step
- name: Setup Buildx
uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@f95db51fddba0c2d1ec667646a06c2ce06100226 # v3.0.0
# Looks at our branch/commit to generate tags for our image. Example being if this was triggered by a tag named v5.2, this step would create a tag for image eddiebeazer/docs:v5.2
- name: Docker image meta
id: image-meta
uses: docker/metadata-action@e6428a5c4e294a61438ed7f43155db912025b6b3 # v5
with:
images: eddiebeazer/docs
- name: Install dependencies
run: yarn install --frozen-lockfile
- name: Build app
run: yarn build
# builds and pushes our image. The cache-to/from step is what will export our image layers to our github cache for us to consume in a future build
- name: Build and push image
uses: docker/build-push-action@4a13e500e55cf31b7a5d59a38ab2040ab0f42f56 # v5
with:
context: .
platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64
push: true
tags: ${{ steps.image-meta.outputs.tags }}
labels: ${{ steps.image-meta.outputs.labels }}
cache-from: type=gha
cache-to: type=gha,mode=max
