cache VS buildkit

Compare cache vs buildkit and see what are their differences.

cache

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

buildkit

concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit (by moby)
Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
cache buildkit
40 52
4,201 7,592
2.4% 2.1%
7.4 9.8
6 days ago 8 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
    โžœ getting-started-with-act git:(master) act -j build WARN โš  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'. โš  [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿš€ Start image=node:16-buster-slim [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker pull image=node:16-buster-slim platform= username= forcePull=false [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker create image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker run image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] โ˜ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/setup-node' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] โ˜ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/cache' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] โ˜ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] โญ Run Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act/. dst=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act [Node.js CI/build] โœ… Success - Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] โญ Run Main Use Node.js 16.x [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/.cache/act/actions-setup-node@v3/ dst=/var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/ [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿณ docker exec cmd=[node /var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/dist/setup/index.js] user= workdir= [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿ’ฌ ::debug::isExplicit: [Node.js CI/build] ๐Ÿ’ฌ ::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

buildkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of buildkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-03.
  • The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    > We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

    You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

    It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

  • macOS Containers v0.0.1
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
  • Jenkins Agents On Kubernetes
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Sep 2023
    Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):
  • Cicada - CI/CD platform written with Rust
    2 projects | /r/rust | 25 Apr 2023
    Yeah, only Linux containers at the moment, BuildKit is the way we are constructing pipelines and doing caching. Split on if we will support non-linux hosts, but definitely want to find a good solution to not doing Docker-in-Docker.
  • Better support of Docker layer caching in Cargo
    2 projects | /r/rust | 30 Mar 2023
    Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.
  • DockerHub replacement stratagy and options
    5 projects | /r/ipfs | 16 Mar 2023
    If you notice, the same thing I noticed in this list is that most of these are workarounds to support the web2 api on IPFS. There is a pull in draft for BuildKit that may make native IPFS image support better on the image build side. With the work on the nerdctl side being the most direct support for images for pushing and pulling images with IPFS hashes.
  • Why I joined Dagger
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2023
    Last year I joined Dagger after realizing we were trying to solve all of the same problems (escaping YAML hell, unifying CI and dev workflows, minimizing CI overhead โ€“ more on all that later). We were even using the same underlying technology (Buildkit) and running into all of the same challenges.
  • Rails on Docker ยท Fly
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2023
    How would you do this in a generic, reusable way company-wide? Given that you don't know the targets beforehand, the names, or even the number of stages.

    It is of course possible to do for a single project with a bit of effort: build each stage with a remote OCI cache source, push the cash there after. But... that sucks.

    What you want is the `max` cache type in buildkit[1]. Except... not much supports that yet. The native S3 cache would also be good once it stabalizes.

    1. https://github.com/moby/buildkit#export-cache

    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2023
    I know those questions are probably rhetorical, but to answer them anyway:

    > > Nice syntax

    > Is it though?

    The most common alternative is to use a backslash at the end of each line, to create a line continuation. This swallows the newline, so you also need a semicolon. Forgetting the semicolon leads to weird errors. Also, while Docker supports comments interspersed with line continuations, sh doesn't, so if such a command contains comments it can't be copied into sh.

    There heredoc syntax doesn't have any of these issues; I think it is infinitely better.

    (There is also JSON-style syntax, but it requires all backslashes to be doubled and is less popular.)

    *In practice "&&" is normally used rather than ";" in order to stop the build if any command fails (otherwise sh only propagates the exit status of the last command). This is actually a small footgun with the heredoc syntax, because it is tempting to just use a newline (equivalent to a semicolon). The programmer must remember to type "&&" after each command, or use `set -e` at the start of the RUN command, or use `SHELL ["/bin/sh", "-e", "-c"]` at the top of the Dockerfile. Sigh...

    > Are the line breaks semantic, or is it all a multiline string?

    The line breaks are preserved ("what you see is what you get").

    > Is EOF a special end-of-file token

    You can choose which token to use (EOF is a common convention, but any token can be used). The text right after the "<<" indicates which token you've chosen, and the heredoc is terminated by the first line that contains just that token.

    This allows you to easily create a heredoc containing other heredocs. Can you think of any other quoting syntax that allows that? (Lisp's quote form comes to mind.)

    > Where is it documented?

    The introduction blog post has already been linked. The reference documentation (https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/frontend/docker...) mentions but doesn't have a formal specification (unfortunately this is a wider problem for Dockerfiles, see https://supercontainers.github.io/containers-wg/ideas/docker... instead it links to the sh syntax (https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...), on which the Dockerfile heredoc syntax is based.

    (Good luck looking up this syntax if you don't know what it's called. But that's the same for most punctuation-based syntax.)

    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2023
    Unfortunately this syntax is not generally supported yet - it's only supported with the buildkit backend and only landed in the 1.3 "labs" release. It was moved to stable in early 2022 (see https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/2574), so that seems to be better, but I think may still require a syntax directive to enable.

    Many other dockerfile build tools still don't support it, e.g. buildah (see https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/3474)

    Useful now if you have control over the environment your images are being built in, but I'm excited to the future where it's commonplace!

What are some alternatives?

When comparing cache and buildkit you can also consider the following projects:

buildah - A tool that facilitates building OCI images.

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

upload-artifact

jib - ๐Ÿ— Build container images for your Java applications.

buildx - Docker CLI plugin for extended build capabilities with BuildKit

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...

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.

amazon-ecr-login - Logs into Amazon ECR with the local Docker client.

act - Run your GitHub Actions locally ๐Ÿš€

actions-runner-controller - Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners

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