Ubicloud Cache

This guide describes how to integrate your GitHub Action workflows with Ubicloud Cache.

Ubicloud starts a clean and ephemeral VM for each new workflow job for security purposes. Fresh VMs need to download job dependencies, leading to increased network usage, longer runtimes, and higher costs. GitHub Actions cache allows to share dependencies and other commonly reused files between workflow jobs.

Ubicloud Cache improves on the GitHub Actions cache by storing cached files closer to Ubicloud runners, making cache downloading/uploading more reliable and up to 4x faster. Ubicloud Cache offers 30 GB of free storage per repository per week, at 3x of GitHub’s default cache size. If you exceed this limit, the oldest caches are automatically deleted to make space for new ones. Additionally, caches that haven’t been accessed in the past seven days are automatically removed.

There are two ways to use Ubicloud Cache:

1. Ubicloud Transparent Cache (Recommended)
2. Ubicloud Cache Actions

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Ubicloud Transparent Cache

It is the recommended way to use Ubicloud’s cache infrastructure. Transparent cache gives you immense flexibility when using Ubicloud’s runners, allowing you to switch between Ubicloud’s runners and GitHub’s default runners without modifying your workflow files. You only need to enable it in the Ubicloud console.

Transparent cache supports all actions caching files, including:

• File/Folder Caching with actions/cache: Cache specific files or directories like dependencies or build outputs to speed up workflows.

• Package Manager Caching with actions/setup-*: Automatically caches dependencies for languages such as Python (actions/setup-python), Node.js (actions/setup-node), and Go (actions/setup-go). 3rd party actions are also supported for some languages like Rust (Swatinem/rust-cache).

• Docker Layer Caching with docker/build-push-action: Speeds up container builds by caching unchanged layers using type=gha:

- name: Build and push Docker images
  uses: docker/build-push-action
  with:
    cache-from: type=gha
    cache-to: type=gha

Transparent cache improves download performance by 4x and upload performance by 3x on Ubicloud runners, with ongoing efforts to enhance upload speeds even further.

For a deep dive into its implementation and detailed performance metrics, check out the GitHub Actions Transparent Cache Blog Post.

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Ubicloud Cache Actions

Ubicloud Cache Actions are drop-in replacements for actions/cache as ubicloud/cache and actions/setup-* as ubicloud/setup-*.

It requires you to change the action names in your workflow files. It also doesn’t support docker layer caching. Only advantage of using Ubicloud Cache Actions over Transparent Cache is that it has 65% better save performance as it is optimized to increase concurrency during file uploads. We are working on improving Transparent Cache’s upload performance to match it.

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Migrating to ubicloud/cache

Replace actions/cache with ubicloud/cache in your workflows. Ubicloud Cache fully supports GitHub Actions Cache functionality.

- uses: actions/cache@v4
+ uses: ubicloud/cache@v4
with:
   path: ~/.cache/pip
   key: ${{ runner.os }}-pip-${{ hashFiles('**/requirements.txt') }}
   restore-keys: |
     ${{ runner.os }}-pip-

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Migrating to Ubicloud’s Language-Specific Cache Actions

Ubicloud offers optimized replacements for actions/setup-*. To migrate, replace actions/setup-* with ubicloud/setup-* in your workflows.

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Java

- uses: actions/setup-java@v4
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-java@v4

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.Net

- uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v4
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-dotnet@v4

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Python

- uses: actions/setup-python@v5
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-python@v5

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Go

- uses: actions/setup-go@v5
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-go@v5

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NodeJS

- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-node@v4

Some other popular languages have their own setup-* actions, not maintained by GitHub. Ubicloud offers replacements for some of the most popular ones.

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Ruby

- uses: actions/setup-ruby@v1
+ uses: ubicloud/setup-ruby@v1

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Rust

- uses: Swatinem/rust-cache@v2
+ uses: ubicloud/rust-cache@v2