Improve your GitHub Actions Workflow execution time by 32% ⚡

My Workflow

There is a process that gets repeated most of the time across your workflow, a process that is expensive in time speaking; it takes 25 seconds to complete. This process is essential, and without it, you can not do almost anything.

I'm talking about installing the dependencies for your project, npm install for node projects. Without it, you can not build, test, lint or do almost any other operation on your workflow.

We can do something straightforward to downgrade those 25 seconds to 14.3 (an improvement of almost 60%!😮). You only need to apply cache to the dependency installation (npm install). Those 10 seconds saved across all your jobs will add up to 32% improvement.

The secret of achieving an execution improvement of 32% is to be consistent, apply DRY. Every time you need to perform the dependency installation, you need to be sure to use the same set of steps.

Github actions allow us to be consistent super-easy with custom actions. We can define an activity with all the steps needed and then reuse it every time with just one line of code.

Submission Category:

Maintainer Must-Haves

Yaml File or Link to Code

This is the actual action using yarn as the package manager.

# .github/actions/setup/action.yml
name: Setup
description: Setup Node.js, cache and install dependencies
inputs:
  node-version:
    description: Node.js version
    required: false
    default: '16'
runs:
  using: composite
  steps:
    - name: Install Dependencies
      uses: actions/setup-node@v2
      with:
        cache: yarn
        node-version: ${{ inputs.node-version }}
        registry-url: https://registry.npmjs.org
    - name: yarn install
      shell: bash
      run: yarn --frozen-lockfile --no-progress --non-interactive --prefer-offline

To use it on any job:

jobs:
  any-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Get code to get access to custom our actions
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Install Dependencies
        uses: ./.github/actions/setup

      - name: Doing any-job
        run: npm run any-job

Check out the workflow on an actual project.

dianjuar / improve-workspace-execution-32

Improve your workflow execution by 32% just by caching the yarn installation

Improve your Workflow execution time by 32% ⚡

Using cache on dependency installation to achieve up to 32% of execution improvement (GitHub Actions)

Check blog post on Dev.To

View on GitHub

Additional Resources / Info

This discovery was formulated, tested, and explained with numbers statically correct on ngx-deploy-npm project.

@jscutlery/semver project is implementing this improvement