Package manager caching strategy for pnpm and Yarn Modern

[MikeMcC399]

Situation

cypress-io/github-action caches package manager dependencies for:

• npm
• Yarn v1 Classic

and offers no equivalent built-in functionality for:

• pnpm
• Yarn Modern

Background

The variety of package managers has expanded since cypress-io/github-action was originally developed when only npm and Yarn v1 Classic were available and in common use.

The action is set up to recognize the following lockfiles and use GitHub's @actions/cache to cache the related path:

Lockfile	Linux path
package-lock.json	~/.npm
yarn.lock	~/.cache/yarn

The above set of path settings does not however cover all currently used package managers:

Package manager	Command	Linux default example
npm	npm config get cache	~/.npm
pnpm v10	pnpm store path	~/.local/share/pnpm/store/v10
Yarn v1	yarn cache dir	~/.cache/yarn/v6
Yarn Modern node-modules	yarn config get cacheFolder	~/.yarn/berry/cache
Yarn Modern pnp	yarn config get cacheFolder	~/.yarn/berry/cache

This causes the action to attempt to cache unused paths:

• ~/.npm (unused) for pnpm
• ~/.cache/yarn (non-existent) for Yarn Modern

Assessment

GitHub Actions offers a full suite of setup-* actions to cache dependencies of commonly-used package managers.

For Cypress, the relevant caching action is actions/setup-node which offers caching for npm, Yarn (v1 and Modern) and pnpm.

Duplicating the capability from actions/setup-node into cypress-io/github-action for pnpm and Yarn would involve a significant effort and on-going maintenance for the Cypress team.

Recommendations

• [X] keep actions/setup-node for pnpm examples
• [x] add actions/setup-node to Yarn Modern examples #1374
• [ ] add an option to cypress-io/github-action to disable package manager caching, leaving the default as caching enabled (related to https://github.com/cypress-io/github-action/issues/953)
• [x] add any new package manager caching recommendations into the README document

Related

• https://github.com/cypress-io/github-action/issues/953
• https://github.com/cypress-io/github-action/issues/969
• https://github.com/cypress-io/github-action/issues/1044

[MikeMcC399]

Update of Yarn Modern examples is delayed, pending resolution of:

• https://github.com/actions/cache/issues/1541
• https://github.com/actions/setup-node/issues/1233