apk cache in gitlab cicd

Question

I have organized my cicd steps via multiple jobs and to provide files necessary in later jobs or to speed up repeated jobs I cache most of the created files inside the job.

While for most things this works as expected I fail with alpine apk caching.

My .gitlab-ci.yml looks the following and is based on https://gist.github.com/Himura2la/dc054311c96d2737f11dbef6880b61b8:

stages:
- prepare
- build

.job_template: &job_config
  variables:
    APK_CACHE_DIR: $CI_PROJECT_DIR/.cache/apk
    APK_PACKAGES:
      bash
  cache:
    key: $CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG
    paths:
      - $APK_CACHE_DIR
  image: alpine

prepare_alpine_cache:
  <<: *job_config
  stage: prepare
  script:
    - apk update --cache-dir $APK_CACHE_DIR
    - apk add --cache-dir $APK_CACHE_DIR $APK_PACKAGES

do_stuff1:
  <<: *job_config
  stage: build
  script:
    - /bin/bash .gitlab-ci.d/do_stuff1.sh

do_stuff2:
  <<: *job_config
  stage: build
  script:
    - /bin/bash .gitlab-ci.d/do_stuff2.sh

which results in following error:

WARNING: .cache/apk: no matching files. Ensure that the artifact path is relative to the working directory (/builds/my-group/my-project)

I checked the working directory and couldn't find the .cache dir.

Reading https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Package_Keeper#Local_Cache doesn't help me either since on the Docker Image setup-apkcache is not found.

How to cache the packages between jobs? I've done similar with ubuntu images in the past, but don't want to stick with ubuntu for obvious reasons.

Answer 1

You have to create cache folder, please add mkdir -p $APK_CACHE_DIR to prepare_alpine_cache stage.