Support for GHA cache?

[ymarcus93]

Is there a way to configure testcontainers-go to use the GitHub Cache API to cache builds across workflow runs? Something like this: https://docs.docker.com/build/ci/github-actions/cache/#cache-backend-api

[mdelapenya]

Hey @ymarcus93 I'm afraid that tescontainers-go's responsibilities are not to cache things at the CI level, but I think you could use this GH action instead: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/docker-cache?

Would that work for you?

[ymarcus93]

Hey @mdelapenya! Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately, I don't think the linked action solves my usecase entirely. It seems to only cache built Docker images, but what I really want is to cache the intermediate layers that comprise the image.

Note that this action does not perform Docker layer caching. The official Docker build push action performs Docker layer caching for built images but does not cache pulled images.

I can give more context if that helps. Essentially, I'm writing some integration tests with a Dockerfile that modifies a base image from the Docker registry to setup some dependencies needed for the test, and then the final steps are building the binary/sut hosted in the same repo.

So even if I use this action to cache images, testcontainers will still re-build the entire image and not reuse any layers from the cache because it only sees previously built images, not the layers.

I think there might be a way to get it to work if I separate the modifications of the base image imported from Docker hub registry into a separate Dockerfile and have that be cached, but I'm not sure. Ideally, I really just need the layers to be cached.