Enhancement: Automatically disable unsupported cache actions

[sschuberth]

I realize act does not support jobs that use caching actions. However, for user convenience I wonder whether the work-arounds (by leveraging if: ${{ !env.ACT }}) could be avoided by "patching" the original workflow definition.

For example, if there was some (e.g. regex based) search & replace logic, code like

- name: Setup Java
  uses: actions/setup-java@v2
  with:
    distribution: adopt
    java-version: 11
    cache: gradle

could automatically be replaced with

- name: Setup Java
  uses: actions/setup-java@v2
  with:
    distribution: adopt
    java-version: 11

by omitting the final cache: gradle. For for a more complex example, code like

- name: Build all classes
  uses: burrunan/gradle-cache-action@v1
  with:
    arguments: --stacktrace classes -x :reporter-web-app:yarnBuild

could be replaced with

- name: Build all classes
  run: ./gradlew --stacktrace classes -x :reporter-web-app:yarnBuild

Such a replace logic could either be built into act directly, or be freely configurable via some configuration file.

[catthehacker]

This is way too much work and almost impossible to get right

[domaslasauskas]

As a workaround for the first example, you can set cache conditionally:

    - uses: actions/setup-node@v2
      with:
        cache: ${{ !env.ACT && 'npm' || '' }}

Note: Empty string is considered false, so it can't be first value and this wouldn't work: ${{ env.ACT && '' || 'npm' }}

[jamesdh]

Plastering your workflow files with if: ${{ !env.ACT }} is really not a solution, especially given the increasing number of tools that use caching or even how frequently just actions/cache is used in ordinary workflows.

Would it not be possible to just stub this out such that it always returns a negative cache hit, and thus essentially just skips the caching altogether?

[KnisterPeter]

Since act is not only used for local execution this is not an option.
Also, for example the setup-node action, does use the toolkit cache which could not be easily stubbed.

[KnisterPeter]

Instead it would be possible to implement chaching with the embedded artifact server.
But that would be up for the requestors to implement.

[sschuberth]

But that would be up for the requestors to implement.

Any hints at what parts of the code base would need to get touched?

[KnisterPeter]

These: https://github.com/nektos/act/tree/master/pkg/artifacts 😉