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Save action

The save action, as the name suggest, saves a cache. It acts similar to the cache action except that it doesn't necessarily first do a restore. This action can provide you a granular control to only save a cache without having to necessarily restore it, or to do a restore anywhere in the workflow job and not only in post phase.

Inputs

key - 'An explicit key for saving the cache'
path - 'A list of files, directories, and wildcard patterns to cache'
upload-chunk-size - 'The chunk size used to split up large files during upload, in bytes'

Outputs

This action has no outputs.

Use cases

Only save cache

In case you are using separate jobs for generating common artifacts and sharing them across different jobs, this action will help you with your save only needs.

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v3

  - name: Install Dependencies
    if: steps.cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
    run: /install.sh

  - name: Build common artifacts
    run: /build.sh

  - uses: actions/cache/save@v3
    id: cache
    with:
      path: path/to/dependencies
      key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/lockfiles') }}

Re-evaluate cache key while saving

Some technologies like dot-net generate the lockfiles during the build time, due to which the already evaluated ${{ hashFiles('**/lockfiles') }} hash doesn't match the actual hash. Using save action with the same key will not re-evaluate the key as the hash was generated during restores. However passing the expression to re-evaluate the hash would generate a new key in the save action now as save would be called after the build step.

In other words, you can reuse the output of restore action in the input of the save action to input the same key. Otherwise, you can pass the hash logic for the key (ex. ${{ hashFiles('**/lockfiles') }}) and let the save action re-evaluate the key just before executing.

Let's say we have a restore step that computes key at runtime.

uses: actions/cache/restore@v3
id: restore-cache
with:
    key: cache-${{ hashFiles('**/lockfiles') }}

Case 1: Where an user would want to reuse the key as it is

uses: actions/cache/save@v3
with:
    key: steps.restore-cache.output.key

Case 2: Where the user would want to re-evaluate the key

uses: actions/cache/save@v3
with:
    key: npm-cache-${{hashfiles(package-lock.json)}}

Always save cache

There are instances where some flaky test cases would fail the entire workflow and users would get frustrated because the builds would run for hours and the cache couldn't get saved as the workflow failed in between. For such use-cases, users would now have the ability to use actions/cache/save action to save the cache by using if: always() condition. This way the cache will always be saved if generated, or a warning will be thrown that nothing is found on the cache path. Users can also use the if condition to only execute the actions/cache/save action depending on the output of the previous steps. This way they get more control on when to save the cache.

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v3
  .
  . // restore if need be
  .
  - name: Build
    run: /build.sh
  - uses: actions/cache/save@v3
    if: always() // or any other condition to invoke the save action
    with:
      path: path/to/dependencies
      key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/lockfiles') }}

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