Remote caching
What is remote caching?
Remote caching allows Pants to store and retrieve the results of process execution to and from a remote server, rather than only using your machine's local Pants cache. This allows Pants to efficiently share a cache across different runs and different machines, for example, all of your CI workers sharing the same fine-grained cache.
Pants supports several remote caching providers:
- Remote Execution API ("REAPI"), which also supports remote execution
- GitHub Actions Cache
- Local file system
Remote Execution API
Server
See the REAPI server compatibility guide for more information about REAPI-compatible caches.
Pants Configuration
After you have either set up a REAPI cache server or obtained access to one, the next step is to point Pants to it so that Pants will use it to read and write process results.
For the following examples, assume that the REAPI server is running on cache.corp.example.com at port 8980 and that it is on an internal network. Also assume that the name of the REAPI instance is "main." At a minimum, you will need to configure pants.toml as follows:
[GLOBAL]
remote_cache_read = true
remote_cache_write = true
remote_store_address = "grpc://build.corp.example.com:8980"
remote_instance_name = "main"
If the endpoint is using TLS, then the remote_store_address option would be specified with the grpcs:// scheme, i.e. "grpcs://cache.corp.example.com:8980".
Reference
Run pants help-advanced global or refer to Global options. Most remote execution and caching options begin with the prefix --remote.