devops - Optomizing gitlab cicd pipeline's caching

Question

I have a gitlab yaml I've been working on for a bit and while everything works it seems like each job takes quite a bit longer than it should. I tend to think the culprit is that npm files are fetched every time rather than sharing the node_modules cache between jobs.

Short of creating my own docker image, how can I optimize this yaml in a way that reduces the bottlenecks ?

gitlab .yaml

image: node:10.19.0 # https://hub.docker.com/_/node/
# image: node:latest

cache:
  # untracked: true
  key: my-project
  # key: ${CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG} # per branch
  # key:
  #   files:
  #     - package-lock.json # only update cache when this file changes (not working) @jkr
  paths:
    - .npm/
    - node_modules
    - build

stages:
  - prepare # prepares builds, makes build needed for testing
  - test # uses test:build specifically @jkr
  - build
  - deploy

# before_install:

before_script:
  - npm ci --cache .npm --prefer-offline

prepare:
  stage: prepare
  needs: []
  script:
    - npm install

test:
  stage: test
  needs: [prepare]
  except:
    - schedules
  tags:
    - linux
  script:
    - npm run build:dev
    - npm run test:cicd-deps
    - npm run test:cicd # runs puppeteer tests @jkr
  artifacts:
    reports:
      junit: junit.xml
    paths:
      - coverage/

build-staging:
  stage: build
  needs: [prepare]
  only:
    - schedules
  before_script:
    - apt-get update && apt-get install -y zip
  script:
    - npm run build:staging
    - zip -r build-staging.zip build
  # cache:
  #   paths:
  #     - build
  #   <<: *global_cache
  #   policy: push
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - build-staging.zip

deploy-serv1:
  stage: deploy
  needs: [build-staging]
  tags: [linux]
  only:
    - schedules
  #   # - branches@gitlab-org/gitlab
  before_script:
    - apt-get update && apt-get install -y lftp
  script:
    # temporarily using 'verify-certificate no'
    # for more on verify-certificate @jkr: https://www.versatilewebsolutions.com/blog/2014/04/lftp-ftps-and-certificate-verification.html
    # variables do not work with 'single quotes' unless they are "'surrounded by doubles'"
    - lftp -e "set ssl:verify-certificate no; open myserver.org; user $LFTP_USERNAME $LFTP_PASSWORD; mirror --reverse --verbose build/ /var/www/domains/dev/projects/my-project/build/; bye"
  # environment:
  #   name: staging
  #   url: http://dev.myserver.org/projects/my-project/build
  when: manual
  allow_failure: true

build-production:
  stage: build
  needs: [prepare]
  only:
    - schedules
  before_script:
    - apt-get update && apt-get install -y zip
  script:
    - npm run build:staging
    - zip -r build-prod.zip build
  # cache:
  #   paths:
  #     - build
  #   <<: *global_cache
  #   policy: push
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - build-prod.zip

deploy-serv2:
  stage: deploy
  needs: [build-production]
  tags: [linux]
  only:
    - schedules
    # - master
  before_script:
    - apt-get update && apt-get install -y lftp
  script:
    - sh deploy-prod
  environment:
    name: production
    url: http://www.my-project.org
  when: manual
  allow_failure: true

Answer 1

I highly recommend using npm ci instead of npm install. The slow part of installing npm modules is figuring out everything that needs to be installed. If you commit your package-lock.json and use npm ci, it skips that part entirely and just looks at your lockfile to download what's needed. It's significantly faster.