cache-key-exists

Warning
This action is deprecated. The official cache action has similar functionality: https://github.com/actions/cache/tree/main/restore#inputs (lookup-only)

Find out if a key exists in the Github Actions cache.

The default behavior of actions/cache is to download the cache if it exists and give you an output to test against. This action allows you to bypass the download/restore part and instantly return the result.

The output key is the same as actions/cache which makes this a drop in replacement/addition.

Licensed under MIT.

Usage

Check if a key exists in cache before installing dependencies:

name: Test
on: pull_request

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    name: Run tests
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: jbergstroem/cache-key-exists@v1
        id: cache_key_exists
        with:
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-deps-${{ hashFiles('pnpm-lock.yaml') }}
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: ${{ github.repository }}

      - name: Install dependencies
        if: steps.cache_key_exists.outputs.cache-hit !== 'true'
        run: pnpm ci

Parameters

Variable	Default	Required	Description
key		Yes	A string that represents your cache key
token		Yes	Access token to use for api authentication
repository		Yes	Which repository to use - defaults to the current context
fail_exit	`false`		Fail job if key is missing from cache (`true`/`false`)

Output

You can use the output cache-hit to check if the key exists in the cache:

- uses: jbergstroem/cache-key-exists@v1
  id: cache_key_exists
  with:
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-deps-${{ hashFiles('pnpm-lock.yaml') }}

steps.cache_key_exists.outputs.cache-hit now is either true or false

Under the hood

The core of this action is more or less a curl one-liner - you can use it directly:

export KEY="${{ runner.os }}-node-deps-${{ hashFiles('pnpm-lock.yaml') }}"
curl -s \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  "${{ github.api_url }}/repos/${{ github.repository }}/actions/caches?key=${KEY}" \
  | jq -r '"cache-hit=" + (.total_count > 0 | tostring)' >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT"

This action additionally provides proper input validation, shell usage and logging. See it as a battle-tested way of achieving the same as above.

Development

This action is written in Bash (needs 4 or later). It additionally uses curl and jq. For testing and validation purposes, bash_unit, shellcheck, shfmt, actionlint and typos are also required.

If you're using Homebrew, here's a oneliner:

brew install bash curl jq bash_unit shellcheck shfmt actionlint typos-cli

Running tests

Run unit tests with:

bash_unit test/*.sh

End to end tests are run in Github Actions.

jbergstroem / cache-key-exists