Rust Cache Action

A GitHub Action that implements smart caching for rust/cargo projects with sensible defaults.

Example usage

# selecting a toolchain either by action or manual `rustup` calls should happen
# before the plugin, as it uses the current rustc version as its cache key
- uses: actions-rs/toolchain@v1
  with:
    profile: minimal
    toolchain: stable

- uses: Swatinem/rust-cache@v1

Inputs

: key

An optional key that is added to the automatic cache key.

sharedKey An additional key that is stable over multiple jobs.

working-directory The working directory the action operates in, is case the cargo project is not located in the repo root.

Outputs

: cache-hit

This is a boolean flag that will be set to true when there was an exact cache hit.

Cache Effectiveness

This action only caches the dependencies of a crate, so is more effective if the dependency / own code ratio is higher.

It is also most effective for repositories with a Cargo.lock file. Library repositories with only a Cargo.toml file have limited benefits, as cargo will always use the most up-to-date dependency versions, which may not be cached.

Usage with Stable Rust is most effective, as a cache is tied to the Rust version. Using it with Nightly Rust is less effective as it will throw away the cache every day.

Versioning

I use the v1 branch similar to master development, so if you want to have a more stable experience, please use a fixed revision or tag.

Cache Details

The cache currently caches the following directories:

• ~/.cargo/registry/index
• ~/.cargo/registry/cache
• ~/.cargo/git
• ./target

This cache is automatically keyed by:

• the github job,
• the rustc release / host / hash, and
• a hash of the Cargo.lock / Cargo.toml files.

An additional input key can be provided if the builtin keys are not sufficient.

Before persisting, the cache is cleaned of intermediate artifacts and anything that is not a workspace dependency. In particular, no caching of workspace crates will be done. For this reason, this action will automatically set CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 to disable incremental compilation.

The action will try to restore from a previous Cargo.lock version as well, so lockfile updates should only re-build changed dependencies.

Additionally, the action automatically works around cargo#8603 / actions/cache#403 which would otherwise corrupt the cache on macOS builds.