cache VS actions-runner-controller

Compare cache vs actions-runner-controller and see what are their differences.

cache

Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions (by actions)

actions-runner-controller

Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners (by actions)
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cache actions-runner-controller
40 31
4,201 4,132
2.4% 3.5%
7.4 9.0
6 days ago 3 days ago
TypeScript Go
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

cache

Posts with mentions or reviews of cache. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-22.
  • GitHub Actions could be so much better
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2023
    > with no persistent storage

    There's https://github.com/actions/cache though?

  • Optimizing GitHub Actions Performance: Enhance Workflows with Caching
    5 projects | dev.to | 19 Jun 2023
    Use Cache Actions: GitHub Actions provides cache actions that simplify caching implementation. The @actions/cache JavaScript library is a popular choice for managing caching in workflows. It offers flexible options for storing and retrieving cache artifacts based on keys, scopes, and paths.
  • Speeding up GitHub Actions with npm cache
    3 projects | dev.to | 1 Jun 2023
    GitHub maintain a set of repos called actions. One of which is called cache.
  • How I Sliced Deployment Times to a Fraction and Achieved Lightning-Fast Deployments with GitHub Actions
    5 projects | dev.to | 17 May 2023
    By utilizing the actions/cache action action, we implemented a strategy to store and retrieve dependencies, preventing redundant installations.
  • Use GitHub Actions to Make Your GitHub Profile Dynamic
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2023
    I do think it's good practice to enable caching, such that your script doesn't hit RubyGems / pip / npm / etc every time it runs.

    That way at least the automation activity stays entirely within the GitHub / Azure network.

    It looks like you can do that for Ruby by adding this:

    https://github.com/actions/cache/blob/master/examples.md#rub...

        - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
  • A guide to using act with GitHub Actions
    5 projects | dev.to | 23 Mar 2023
    ➜ getting-started-with-act git:(master) act -j build WARN ⚠ You are using Apple M1 chip and you have not specified container architecture, you might encounter issues while running act. If so, try running it with '--container-architecture linux/amd64'. ⚠ [Node.js CI/build] 🚀 Start image=node:16-buster-slim [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker pull image=node:16-buster-slim platform= username= forcePull=false [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker create image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker run image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/setup-node' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/cache' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ⭐ Run Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act/. dst=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act [Node.js CI/build] ✅ Success - Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] ⭐ Run Main Use Node.js 16.x [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/.cache/act/actions-setup-node@v3/ dst=/var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/ [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker exec cmd=[node /var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/dist/setup/index.js] user= workdir= [Node.js CI/build] 💬 ::debug::isExplicit: [Node.js CI/build] 💬 ::debug::explicit? false
  • duplicated cache by cache action
    2 projects | /r/github | 21 Feb 2023
  • runner image with MS office installed - do-able? is there a better way?
    2 projects | /r/github | 30 Dec 2022
    You could try to find some point in the process where you can set up Actions caches with actions/cache, otherwise Container customization for Self-Hosted Runners is currently in Beta.
  • [Question] Decrease Docker image's build time
    2 projects | /r/devops | 27 Sep 2022
    I would configure Github Actions cache so Docker doesn't have to compile all layers from scratch every time
  • The strongest principle of the blog's growth lies in the human choice to deploy it
    14 projects | dev.to | 3 Sep 2022
    In the copied example, npm caching is done via actions/cache@v2 action. But we can simplify our workflow by dropping this step and using built-in functionality for caching

actions-runner-controller

Posts with mentions or reviews of actions-runner-controller. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • Using Kaniko to Build and Publish container image with Github action on Github Self-hosted Runners
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2024
    To set-up the self-hosted runner, an Action Runner Controller (ARC) and Runner scale sets application will be installed via helm. This post will be using Azure Kubernetes Service and ARC that is officialy maintained by Github. There is another ARC that is maintained by the community. You can follow the discussion where github adopted the ARC project into a full Github product here
  • Show HN: DimeRun v2 – Run GitHub Actions on AWS EC2
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    Before this we were using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller but that's running on K8s instead of VMs. So along with common limitations of running CI jos in K8s/container, it cannot have exactly the same environment as the official GitHub runners. Maintaining a K8s cluster was also very difficult.
  • Terraform module for scalable GitHub action runners on AWS
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    ARC is great for running GitHub Actions on Kubernetes:

    https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    There are also official Heml charts available for ARC: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

    I am in the process of setting it up on a cheap Hetzner box. If it works, would be a great deal! You can get a 64 GB RAM box for 35 EUR/mo at server auctions with unlimited traffic. I don't mention CPU or GPU, as typically this isn't a bottleneck for my projects.

    Plus, I can configure cache sharing via host-mounted dir. E.g. pnpm cache can be all in one place, and be locally available to pods via a mounted dir. Same for the Docker image cache. This would speed up CI runs and also reduce network traffic by a huge margin.

    GitHub Actions effectively has no local caching. There's an action for caching, but it uses a blob storage for cache artifacts. Which then gets network fetched, gzip'ed and gunzip'ed each time, and from my experience this has never been a gain for medium to large npm projects, as they have thousands of small .js files in node_modules, and thus takes a long time to compress and decompress. I think npm edge cache servers are already so optimized and fast, that in my experience almost always it's faster to install from npm directly. I even tested this on AWS, where the cache was stored in S3, in the same region as CodeBuild (CI), and direct installs from npm were still faster by about 30%.

    So other than adding more hardware resources, local caching is the only way to significantly speed up GH Actions, from my experience, and thus you must have your runner.

  • Action-runner-controller & Enterprise Git
    4 projects | /r/github | 29 Apr 2023
    Older bugs show setting of enterprise URL ( kubectl set env deploy actions-runner-controller -c manager GITHUB_ENTERPRISE_URL=https:// --namespace actions-runner-system) with and values.yml also shows githubEnterpriseServerURL (https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/blob/master/charts/actions-runner-controller/README.md ).
    4 projects | /r/github | 29 Apr 2023
    You need to use the steps in the repo instead of the steps on the docs if you're using enterprise server.
  • How to save a fortune with self hosted GitHub runners
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2023
    GitHub has made it possible to run GitHub Actions using your own self-hosted runners. Thanks to the Actions Runner Controller it is surprisingly easy to run actions in your Kubernetes clusters.
  • How to reduce the cost of GitHub Actions
    7 projects | dev.to | 26 Jan 2023
    Since GitHub official has not provided to deploy a Self-hosted runner on Kubernetes, I used the Actions Runner Controller (ARC) project, This project allows rapid deployment of Self-hosted runners through Runner custom resources.
  • DeepFlow uses Spot Instances to speed up GitHub Action exploration
    3 projects | dev.to | 20 Nov 2022
    K8s Controller: Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runner
  • Configure actions-runner-controller with proxy in private EKS cluster
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Jun 2022
    View on GitHub

What are some alternatives?

When comparing cache and actions-runner-controller you can also consider the following projects:

upload-artifact

sccache - Sccache is a ccache-like tool. It is used as a compiler wrapper and avoids compilation when possible. Sccache has the capability to utilize caching in remote storage environments, including various cloud storage options, or alternatively, in local storage.

helm-charts - Jenkins helm charts

act - Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

turnstyle - 🎟️A GitHub Action for serializing workflow runs

setup-buildx-action - GitHub Action to set up Docker Buildx

azure-pipelines-agent - Azure Pipelines Agent 🚀

checkout - Action for checking out a repo

buildkit - concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit

setup-qemu-action - GitHub Action to install QEMU static binaries

fluvio - Lean and mean distributed stream processing system written in rust and web assembly.

xmonad - The core of xmonad, a small but functional ICCCM-compliant tiling window manager