Persist a tool’s incremental analysis state

Keep reusable configuration or analysis state in addition to dependency downloads, using the tool’s own cache contract.

Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Persist a tool’s incremental analysis state.

Keep reusable configuration or analysis state in addition to dependency downloads, using the tool’s own cache contract.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/persist-tool-analysis.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.

View all playbooks

How companies used this technique

Read what each company changed and follow the original sources.

Persist the tool’s analysis state separately

In the Go SDK a test job could win the shared cache key before lint saved its tools and analysis. Lint now turns off setup-go caching and owns a cache for modules, Go builds and the golangci-lint cache, keyed per revision with restore fallbacks.

Dedicated cache for modules, compiled tools and analysis Source

Use it when: Lint rebuilds its tools or analysis on every run despite restored dependency caches.
Before applying it: Restore, save and storage can outweigh reuse. Separate writers must never publish incomplete state under another job's key.

Let the build tool reuse unchanged work

Shopify CLI's scripts and CI jobs passed --skip-nx-cache, and a cache input included the commit SHA. Shopify/cli#8239 declares explicit cached targets with shared inputs and the real package-local dist outputs, then removes the bypass from scripts and CI.

The PR reports repeated builds and bundles restoring 12 of 12 tasks from cache. Source

Use it when: The build tool supports task caching and the CI commands bypass it.
Before applying it: A cached task whose inputs leave out a file restores stale work; declare shared configuration, lockfiles and tool versions as inputs.

Cache Gradle configuration as well as dependencies

Stripe Android enabled Gradle’s configuration cache with dedicated restore and save steps. A later change also saved Gradle transforms, and publishing commands run with --no-configuration-cache.

The author reports slightly faster builds. Source

Use it when: Gradle spends noticeable time configuring the same task graph on every run.
Before applying it: Configuration caches can contain secrets, so use Gradle’s encryption support and keep cache writes inside a trusted boundary. Resolve configuration-cache warnings before relying on it, and keep incompatible tasks such as publishing on the uncached path.

How companies used this technique

Persist the tool’s analysis state separately

Let the build tool reuse unchanged work

Cache Gradle configuration as well as dependencies

Related techniques

Cache package downloads and dependency stores

Persist compiler output between runs

Bake stable dependencies into runner images

Company Playbooks

Related guides

Cache workflow dependencies

Cut repeated test setup

Share setup steps across jobs

Optimize npm installs

Optimize pnpm installs