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5. Remote Cache

As your repo grows in size and complexity, the build takes longer and longer even locally. lage elegantly provides an incremental build capability given a locally available cache. When we pair the caching capability of lage with a cloud storage provider, we can speed up local builds with remote cache made available by Continuous Integration, or CI, jobs.

The theory is that when the CI job runs, it'll produce a "last known good" cache to be uploaded in a cloud storage, like Azure Blob Storage. The remote cache has been made available both for build-over-build speed ups in future CI jobs, as well as the local first build scenario.

lage has a "fallback cache" mechanism. lage will look for cache in layers: first on disk, then on remote server. lage will fill the local cache with the remote one if there is a remote cache hit. Next, lage will save the locally built cache into the remote cache if the environment variable LAGE_WRITE_REMOTE_CACHE is set and if the cache is not configured to use a local provider.

Setting up remote cache - Azure Blob Storage​

Follow these steps to set up a remote cache.

1. Upgrade to latest lage​

See the migration guide for more details.

yarn upgrade lage
yarn upgrade lage

2. Create .env and add to .gitignore​

Create the file:

touch .env
touch .env

Be sure to add it to your .gitignore to avoid checking in secrets!

.gitignore
txt
.env
node_modules
lib
dist
.gitignore
txt
.env
node_modules
lib
dist

3. Generate auth tokens from Azure storage account​

Prerequisite is to have a working Storage Account with Blob Storage Container created. Note that container name, it'll be needed for Step 5.

  1. Select the following for a read-only connection string:
  2. Set the start & expiry time to something appropriate
  3. Click "Generate SAS and connection string" button
  4. Save the "connection string" - this is your read-only connection string
  5. Click on "Access Keys" tab on the left
  6. Click "show keys"
  7. Save the "connection string" - this is your read-write connection string (alternatively, you can create a read-write SAS connection string)

4. Modify the .env file with the remote cache connection information​

.env
txt
## This is required as of right now
BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER="azure-blob"
## READ-ONLY SAS
BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS={"connectionString":"the **read-only** connection string","container":"CONTAINER NAME"}
.env
txt
## This is required as of right now
BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER="azure-blob"
## READ-ONLY SAS
BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS={"connectionString":"the **read-only** connection string","container":"CONTAINER NAME"}

5. Create a "secret" in the CI system for a Read/Write token​

Here's an example snippet of Github Action with the correct environment variable set:

yaml
- run: yarn lage build test --verbose
  env:
    BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER: azure-blob
    BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS: ${{ secrets.BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS }}
    LAGE_WRITE_REMOTE_CACHE: true
yaml
- run: yarn lage build test --verbose
  env:
    BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER: azure-blob
    BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS: ${{ secrets.BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS }}
    LAGE_WRITE_REMOTE_CACHE: true

Create a secret named "BACKFILL_CACHE_PROVIDER_OPTIONS":

{"connectionString":"the **read-write** connection string","container":"CONTAINER NAME"}
{"connectionString":"the **read-write** connection string","container":"CONTAINER NAME"}
note

Uploading cache to a remote is not the default​

Without the LAGE_WRITE_REMOTE_CACHE environment variable, lage no longer uploads build caches to the remote server.

Accessing environment variables​

Lage picks up your .env file contents using dotenv utility under the hood (see backfill-utils-dotenv implementation).

Need to access environment variables from the .env file in your application? You would need to setup a mechanism to inject them. Try using utilities like dotenv (for Node.js) or env-cmd (for executing commands).