ci: stop rebuilding the whole workspace on every run
Nightly Build / build (push) Canceled after 6m16s

Cargo decides freshness by mtime, and the Gitea runner deletes the job
workspace after each run. So `actions/checkout` stamped every source file
with "now" and all 20 workspace crates recompiled regardless of what the
commit touched: measured on a JS-only commit, 20 of 722 rlibs rebuilt —
the ~700 third-party deps stayed cached, our own code never did. That,
not the size of skald-core, was the 4 minutes per architecture.

Restore mtimes from git history after checkout (needs the full history,
hence fetch-depth: 0 — cheap here, ~170 commits against a Gitea instance
on the same machine).

Also:

- nightly: CARGO_INCREMENTAL=1. Release builds have incremental off by
  default, the worst case for a 51k-line crate. The nightly trades a
  marginally less optimised binary for the rebuild time; release does not.
- nightly: concurrency with cancel-in-progress. The runner has capacity 1
  and the nightly publishes to a fixed filename, so a queued build was
  8 minutes spent on a tarball the next one overwrites.
- release: its own CARGO_TARGET_DIR. CARGO_INCREMENTAL is part of cargo's
  profile fingerprint, so one shared cache between a workflow that sets it
  and one that does not would have each invalidate the other's workspace
  crates — reintroducing the very rebuild this removes.
- packaging steps derive --target-dir from $CARGO_TARGET_DIR instead of
  repeating the path, so the two cannot drift.
This commit is contained in:
Daniele
2026-08-10 18:21:06 +01:00
parent f6f94e579d
commit e0d75a8dc8
2 changed files with 58 additions and 5 deletions
+37 -2
View File
@@ -5,15 +5,50 @@ on:
branches:
- main
# A push that lands while a nightly is still building makes that build obsolete:
# the nightly publishes to a fixed filename, so only the last one survives
# anyway. The runner has capacity 1, so without this a second push waits out a
# full 8-minute build whose tarball is overwritten minutes later. Cancelling
# keeps the queue one deep and the published nightly always the newest commit.
concurrency:
group: nightly
cancel-in-progress: true
jobs:
build:
runs-on: linux-amd64
env:
CARGO_TARGET_DIR: /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target
# Release builds have incremental compilation OFF by default, which is the
# worst case for this tree: skald-core is 51k lines in one crate, so a
# one-line change recodegens all of it. The nightly trades a marginally
# less optimised binary for the rebuild time. The release workflow
# deliberately does NOT set this — there the binary quality wins.
CARGO_INCREMENTAL: 1
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
# `git restore-mtime` dates each file from the last commit that
# touched it, so it needs the full history. A shallow clone would date
# every file at HEAD and defeat the whole point. Cheap here: ~170
# commits, and the Gitea instance runs on this same machine.
fetch-depth: 0
# Cargo decides what to recompile by mtime, and the runner deletes the job
# workspace after every run — so a fresh clone stamps every source file
# with "now" and all 20 workspace crates rebuild even on a commit that
# only touched web/*.js. Measured: 20 of 722 rlibs rebuilt on a JS-only
# commit, i.e. the ~700 third-party deps stay cached and our own code
# never does. Restoring mtimes from git history is what makes
# CARGO_TARGET_DIR actually cache the workspace and not just the deps.
#
# Consequence to respect: do NOT reuse this target dir to rebuild an older
# commit. Mtimes would go backwards and cargo could treat artifacts built
# from newer code as fresh. Use a separate CARGO_TARGET_DIR for that.
- name: Restore source mtimes from git history
run: git restore-mtime
- name: Build native (linux/amd64)
run: |
@@ -36,7 +71,7 @@ jobs:
--version nightly \
--os linux \
--arch amd64 \
--target-dir /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target/release \
--target-dir "$CARGO_TARGET_DIR/release" \
--output dist/
- name: Package arm64
@@ -46,7 +81,7 @@ jobs:
--version nightly \
--os linux \
--arch arm64 \
--target-dir /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/release \
--target-dir "$CARGO_TARGET_DIR/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/release" \
--output dist/
- name: Deploy to builds.skaldagent.net