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Caching in GitHub Actions: Speed Up Your Workflows the Right Way
A practical guide to making your CI pipelines faster, more efficient, and less frustrating.
If you’ve ever stared at a CI job reinstalling the same dependencies for the hundredth time, you’re not alone. Slow pipelines kill productivity, and GitHub Actions isn’t immune to that. The good news? GitHub provides a powerful built-in caching mechanism — and when used right, it can dramatically reduce your workflow execution times.
But caching in GitHub Actions can be tricky. It’s not just plug-and-play, and a poorly configured cache is often worse than no cache at all.
This post will walk you through how caching actually works in GitHub Actions, common pitfalls, and how to use it effectively across common scenarios like Node.js, Python, Docker, and Terraform.
What Is GitHub Actions Caching, Really?
At a high level, caching in GitHub Actions lets you persist files and directories between workflow runs. That means you can avoid downloading dependencies, rebuilding Docker images, or recompiling code from scratch every single time.
GitHub provides a native actions/cache action that allows you to save and restore folders based on a cache key.
