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
+21 -3
View File
@@ -29,10 +29,28 @@ jobs:
version: ${{ steps.extract-version.outputs.version }}
env:
CARGO_TARGET_DIR: /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target
# Deliberately NOT the nightly's target dir. No CARGO_INCREMENTAL here —
# a release binary is the one people install, so it gets the fully
# optimised non-incremental build — and that flag is part of cargo's
# profile fingerprint. Sharing one cache between a workflow that sets it
# and one that doesn't would make each run invalidate the other's
# workspace crates, which is exactly the cost this whole change removes.
CARGO_TARGET_DIR: /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target-release
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
# Full history: `git restore-mtime` below dates each file from the
# last commit that touched it.
fetch-depth: 0
# See the long note in nightly.yml: the runner wipes the job workspace
# after every run, so without this every source file is stamped "now" on
# checkout and all 20 workspace crates rebuild from scratch regardless of
# what the commit changed. This is what lets CARGO_TARGET_DIR cache our
# own crates and not just the ~700 third-party deps.
- name: Restore source mtimes from git history
run: git restore-mtime
- name: Extract version from Cargo.toml
id: extract-version
@@ -66,7 +84,7 @@ jobs:
--version "${{ steps.extract-version.outputs.version }}" \
--os linux \
--arch amd64 \
--target-dir /home/dguiducci/.cache/skald-ci/target/release \
--target-dir "$CARGO_TARGET_DIR/release" \
--output dist/
- name: Package arm64
@@ -76,7 +94,7 @@ jobs:
--version "${{ steps.extract-version.outputs.version }}" \
--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