feature request: local cache store for self-hosted runners

because i, as well as many others, are having issues with the caching service, a nice feature for self-hosted runners would be to have a cache local to the self-hosted runner, perhaps configurable by the self-hosted runner.

currently for me, it’s faster to not cache and just run npm ci than to load/save cache on self-hosted runners.

[joshuapinter]

I would love to see this as well, primarily for node_modules via yarn. We’re using a farm of self-hosted runners and using actions/cache is the same, if not slower, than just installing all the dependencies again from a blank slate, depending on the utilization of the network, etc.

We have to use our own tasks/steps to essentially do what actions/cache does but with a local directory. Just would be nice to not have to re-invent the wheel here and, instead, specify a cache “location” or “path” to use instead of using the remote cache on GitHub/Azure.

Here’s a quick benchmark to show you the performance hit self-hosted runners have with using the default remote cache:

Remote Cache Using github/actions.

2m48s

And that’s WITH a cache hit.

Local Cache.

Cache Miss

1m42s

Cache Hit

~0m01s

Anyway, just would be nice to not have to do this manually and get all the nice features of actions/cache for self-hosted runners.

[jonathanong]

It’d be nice to not have to build out a bespoke cache system to run on the self-hosted runner

I think that’s the main point. I could set up my own caching system, but then it would be a custom action. Ideally, it’s the same actions API, but with a different “backend”.

Another feature I’d like is to avoid slow cache uploads/downloads, which are much slower if your self-hosted runner doesn’t have great internet speeds, especially upload speeds.