Explain CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES when node is used

[alexislefebvre]

Hello,
on this page: https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/partials/cached-dependencies/

This is unclear if node dependencies can be cached or not. Could you please explain what languages are supported by CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES?

I deployed node with and without this environment variable, it took the same time.

The goal is to cache the dependencies of yarn, even between several deployments, so that yarn don't download the packages each time we deploy the node project.

[alexislefebvre]

The link in the issue shouldn't be accessible, this file is meant to be included in other pages, e.g. https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/getting-started/by-language/python/#cached-dependencies

[alexislefebvre]

The CleverCloud support told me to use CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES="true"with npm/yarn, and that it caches the .npm and .cache/yarn folders.

So I'm trying to use this configuration:

CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES="true"
CC_PRE_BUILD_HOOK="yarn config set yarn-offline-mirror .cache/yarn ; yarn config set install.prefer-offline true"
YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=".cache/yarn"

The last 2 may be redundant, but let's see if it speeds up the deployment before changing it.

[alexislefebvre]

I tested the configuration from the previous comment on a new project, here is what I see:

Uploading application dependencies cache archive… file is 120K before compression.

It looks like dependencies are not cached, CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES is still a mystery to me, any help from Clever Cloud would be welcome.

[alexislefebvre]

It looks like CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES is active only if we choose to build the project on a dedicated instance.

[alexislefebvre]

When using a dedicated instance for the build step, yarn install takes less 40 seconds. But then uploading the cache takes a long time:

2023-10-11T15:30:42+02:00 Uploading application build cache archive… file is 1.4G before compression.
2023-10-11T15:30:53+02:00 2023-10-11T13:30:53.267558Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Uploaded part=1
2023-10-11T15:31:02+02:00 2023-10-11T13:31:02.087727Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Uploaded part=2
2023-10-11T15:31:10+02:00 2023-10-11T13:31:10.613681Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Uploaded part=3
2023-10-11T15:31:19+02:00 2023-10-11T13:31:19.318276Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Uploaded part=4
2023-10-11T15:31:21+02:00 2023-10-11T13:31:21.075030Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Uploaded part=5
2023-10-11T15:31:21+02:00 2023-10-11T13:31:21.399750Z INFO multipart_upload_lib::uploader: Completed the multipart upload
2023-10-11T15:31:21+02:00 Done uploading build cache archive 

And downloading the cache archive takes some time too, so using a dedicated instance doesn't speed up the deployment of our app.

[alexislefebvre]

It looks like starting the project once with a dedicated instance for the build step populated the cache, and now that no dedicated instance is used for the build step, the deployment skip the yarn install step and it boots very quickly!