CACHE.md

Cache Configuration

Makisu supports distributed cache, which can significantly reduce build time, by up to 90% for some of Uber's code repos. Makisu caches docker image layers both locally and in docker registry (if --push parameter is provided). It uses a separate key-value store to map lines of a Dockerfile to names of the layers.

For cache key-value store, Makisu supports 3 choices: local file cache, redis based distributed cache, and generic HTTP based distributed cache.

Local file cache

If no cache options are provided, local file cache is used by default. To configure local file cache TTL:

--local-cache-ttl duration        Time-To-Live for local cache (default 336h0m0s)

To disable it, set ttl to 0s.

Redis cache

To configure redis cache, use the following options:

--redis-cache-addr string         The address of a redis server for cacheID to layer sha mapping
--redis-cache-password string           The password of the Redis server, should match 'requirepass' in redis.conf
--redis-cache-ttl duration        Time-To-Live for redis cache (default 336h0m0s)

HTTP cache

To configure HTTP cache, use the following options:

--http-cache-addr string          The address of the http server for cacheID to layer sha mapping
--http-cache-header stringArray   Request header for http cache server. Format is "--http-cache-header <header>:<value>"

Explicit commit and cache

By default, Makisu will cache each directive in a Dockerfile. To avoid committing and caching everything, the layer cache can be further optimized via explicit caching with the --commit=explicit flag. Dockerfile directives may then be manually cached using the #!COMMIT annotation:

FROM node:8.1.3

ADD package.json package.json
ADD pre-build.sh

# A bunch of pre-install steps here.
...
...
...

# A step to be cached. A single layer will be committed and cached here on top of base image.
RUN npm install #!COMMIT

...
...
...

# The last step of the last stage always commit by default, generating and caching another layer.
ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash"]

In this example, only 2 additional layers on top of base image will be generated and cached.