Skip to main content

Azure DevOps - Improve build time

During our last retrospective, one of the complaints was that the build time was too long. We were using the Hosted Build Services on Azure and restoring the NPM packages on every build took way too long.

Fortunately, Azure DevOps now offers a new build task called cache task. This task will restore the cached data based on the provided inputs. Let’s see how we can use this task to cache our NPM packages:

  • Add the cache task to your build steps

  • Now we first need to set a cache key. The cache key is be used as the identifier for the cache and can be a combination of string values, file paths and file patterns. In our case we want to use the package-lock.json file as the key. Every time the package-lock.json changes the cache will be invalidated and the npm packages will be restored again.
    • **/package-lock.json, !**/node_modules/**/package-lock.json, !**/.*/**/package-lock.json
  • The second thing we need to set is the directory to populate the cache from and restore back to. As we want to cache the npm packages we cache the ‘node_modules’ folder:
    • $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/Bridges.CMS.SPA/node_modules

Now if we build again, the first time the cache is populated and the second time we win a lot of time as the node_modules folder is restored from the cache. Yippie!


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

.NET 8–Keyed/Named Services

A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the support for Keyed or Named Services. This feature allows you to register the same type multiple times using different names, allowing you to resolve a specific instance based on the circumstances. Although there is some controversy if supporting this feature is a good idea or not, it certainly can be handy. To support this feature a new interface IKeyedServiceProvider got introduced in .NET 8 providing 2 new methods on our ServiceProvider instance: object? GetKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); object GetRequiredKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); To use it, we need to register our service using one of the new extension methods: Resolving the service can be done either through the FromKeyedServices attribute: or by injecting the IKeyedServiceProvider interface and calling the GetRequiredKeyedServic...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more