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A GitHub Action that helps persist state written to disk across jobs. This action can serve as a superior alternative to the Actions cache, especially when the cache artifacts are extremely large. Each sticky disk is hot-loaded into the runner and mounted at the specified path. The sticky disk is formatted as an ext4 filesystem. Architecture

Blacksmith stores sticky disk artifacts in a secure, highly performant Ceph cluster, running on local NVMe drives. Our runners proxy their requests through our Storage Agents to interact with the Ceph cluster. Each sticky disk is uniquely identified by a key. When a GitHub Action job requests a sticky disk, the last committed snapshot will be cloned and mounted into the runner at the specified path. Once the job completes, the sticky disk will be unmounted and committed for future invocations. At the moment, customers can use up to 5 sticky disks in a single GitHub Action job. Use Cases NPM Package Caching Node.js projects can have extensive dependency trees, leading to large node_modules directories. Sticky disks provide persistent, high-performance storage for your NPM packages. jobs : build : runs-on : blacksmith steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v4 - name : Setup Node.js uses : actions/setup-node@v4 with : node-version : ' 18.x' - name : Mount NPM Cache uses : useblacksmith/stickydisk@v1 with : key : ${{ github.repository }}-npm-cache path : ~/.npm - name : Mount node_modules uses : useblacksmith/stickydisk@v1 with : key : ${{ github.repository }}-node-modules path : ./node_modules - name : Install Dependencies run : npm ci - name : Build run : npm run build Bazel Build Caching Bazel's remote cache can significantly improve build times, but uploading and downloading cached artifacts can still be a bottleneck. Using sticky disks with Blacksmith runners provides near-instant access to your Bazel caches as they are bind mounted into your runners on demand. Our useblacksmith/setup-bazel@v2 action is a zero-confg way to use sticky disks to store the disk, repository, and external cache. jobs : build : runs-on : blacksmith steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v4 - name : Setup Bazel uses : useblacksmith/setup-bazel@v2 with : version : ' 6.x' - name : Build run : | bazel build //... Cache Performance Comparison Caching Solution Cache Size Average Download Speed Time to Access GitHub Actions Cache 6GB 90 MB/s ~1m6s Blacksmith Cache 6GB 400 MB/s ~15s Sticky Disks 6GB N/A 3 seconds

A GitHub Action that helps persist state written to disk across jobs. This action can serve as a superior alternative to the Actions cache, especially when the cache artifacts are extremely large. Each sticky disk is hot-loaded into the runner and mounted at the specified path. The sticky disk is formatted as an ext4 filesystem.

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