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Overview

When you run jobs on Blacksmith, all official GitHub and popular third-party cache actions transparently interact with our 4x faster, colocated cache, instead of GitHub’s backend. Zero code changes are required. 
    # If it's running on Blacksmith, it will use our cache
    name: Cache Cargo dependencies
    uses: actions/cache@v4
Currently, the Rust sccache and the GitHub Actions cache option in the docker/build-push-action are still redirected to GitHub’s backend. For 40x faster Docker builds, please use our Blacksmith Docker actions. For more information, refer to the Docker builds page.

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Basics

GitHub’s cache action stores artifacts in Azure Blob Storage. When your runner isn’t in the same availability zone, downloads are often slow and unreliable. Blacksmith fixes this by storing cache artifacts in the same datacenter as your runners. Our approach removes network latency and almost saturates the NIC. As a result, your downloads complete around 4x faster, with no code changes required.

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Branch Protected Caches

When using our colocated cache, each cache entry will be scoped to its branch or tag to ensure cache entries are only accessible to the appropriate workflow runs. This enhances the security of our cache offering by creating a logical boundary between cache artifacts. These access restrictions are consistent with GitHub’s implementation. If you would rather share cache artifacts across branches in a repository, you can toggle this feature off in the settings page of your Blacksmith dashboard.

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Opt out

If you’d rather not use our cache for any reason, just let us know by opening a support ticket and we’ll disable it for you.

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Pricing

There is no additional cost for using our cache. For all other pricing, please visit our pricing page.

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FAQ

By default, we provide 25GB of free storage per repo per week, a substantial increase from GitHub’s 10GB to maximize your cache hits.
If you’d like us to increase the allowed cache size for your organization, contact us at support@blacksmith.sh.
Like GitHub, our cache evicts the least recently used cache entries that were last accessed more than 7 days ago.
Our useblacksmith/cache action and all language-specific cache actions (e.g. useblacksmith/setup-go, useblacksmith/setup-node, useblacksmith/setup-python, useblacksmith/setup-ruby, useblacksmith/setup-java, useblacksmith/rust-cache, etc.) are archived and will no longer be maintained by Blacksmith.Our new cache requires no code changes and works automatically with GitHub’s native cache actions. We recommend migrating any workflows still referencing useblacksmith/* cache forks to the upstream versions of those actions.