GitHub First Party Actions Cache

This repository contains the code and scripts responsible for caching actions locally on a GitHub Actions Runner.

This allows you to speedup actions execution without the cost of downloading actions during the course of your job during the Setup Job step. This repository only caches the most popular first party actions, to save disk space.

A configuration file exists for each repository (see config/actions/). The refs are pinned to specific commit SHAs.

Which refs are included?

By default only main and version tags are included. For example: v1 or v2.0.1

Preview versions are intentionally excluded. For example: v2-beta

Optional args may be supplied to control which refs are included. See script/add-action.sh --help for more info.

Ignoring old versions

To exclude certain old version tags from being packaged, add an ignoreTags array to the action config JSON file. Each entry is a regex pattern that will be tested against tag names.

When adding a new action, use the --ignore-tags option with simple version prefixes:

./script/add-action.sh --ignore-tags "v1,v2" actions/checkout

This will automatically generate regex patterns that match v1, v1.x, v2, v2.x, etc.

For existing actions, use the helper script to add ignore tags:

./script/add-ignore-tags.sh --ignore-tags "v1,v2" actions/checkout

Or add ignoreTags directly to the JSON config file:

{
  "owner": "actions",
  "repo": "checkout",
  "ignoreTags": [
    "^v1(\\..*)?$",
    "^v2(\\..*)?$"
  ]
}

Tags matching any of the patterns will be excluded from the generated scripts while remaining in the config for historical reference. The ignoreTags field is preserved when running update-action.sh.

How to use this in the self-hosted runner?

Please read the doc @kenmuse has put together at: https://www.kenmuse.com/blog/building-github-actions-runner-images-with-an-action-archive-cache/

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT open source license. Please refer to MIT for the full terms.

Maintainers

CODEOWNERS

Contributing

See the contribution guide. Currently we are not taking requests for non first party actions to be added at this time.