Gitlab pipeline running very slow - docker

Question

I am using Gitlab as my DevOps platform and running pipeline in docker container. So i am using docker executor and my runner is running as a docker container.
Below is my gitlab-ci.yml file which is doing nothing but npm install cypress
stages:
- release
release:
image: node:12.19.0
stage: release
only:
refs:
- master
- alpha
- /^(([0-9]+)\.)?([0-9]+)\.x/
- /^([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)(?:-([0-9A-Za-z-]+(?:\.[0-9A-Za-z-]+)*))?(?:\+[0-9A-Za-z-]+)?$/
before_script:
- export http_proxy=http://17.14.45.41:8080/
- export https_proxy=http://17.14.45.41:8080/
- echo 'strict-ssl=false'>>.npmrc
script:
# - npm ci
- npm install cypress
When i run this job, it takes almost 12 minutes which is hell lot of time. My Gitlab is self hosted and I am using proxy to talk to outside world but I don't think proxy has any issue because when i do docker pull it works fine and runs instantly.
I don't know if there is anything I could do or I am missing in Gitlab configuration but if anyone has any ideas please let me know. That will be great help.

Answer 1

I don't know your project and if you have too much dependencies do download and install.
To improve the performance, you need to use the cache https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/caching/ feature of gitlab
but, before doing it, you need to configure the cypress cache folder using the environment variable CYPRESS_CACHE_FOLDER https://docs.cypress.io/guides/getting-started/installing-cypress.html#Environment-variables, look at my example below
CYPRESS_CACHE_FOLDER: '$CI_PROJECT_DIR/cache/Cypress'
I'm telling to cypress to download all the dependencies and binaries to this specific folder, and after that, I configured the gitlab to cache this folder
stage: ci
cache:
paths:
- cache/Cypress
In your case your .gitlab-ci.yml file will be
stages:
- release
release:
image: node:12.19.0
variables:
CYPRESS_CACHE_FOLDER: '$CI_PROJECT_DIR/cache/Cypress'
stage: release
cache:
paths:
- cache/Cypress
only:
refs:
- master
- alpha
- /^(([0-9]+)\.)?([0-9]+)\.x/
- /^([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)(?:-([0-9A-Za-z-]+(?:\.[0-9A-Za-z-]+)*))?(?:\+[0-9A-Za-z-]+)?$/
before_script:
- export http_proxy=http://17.14.45.41:8080/
- export https_proxy=http://17.14.45.41:8080/
- echo 'strict-ssl=false'>>.npmrc
script:
# - npm ci
- npm install cypress
But don't forget you need to configure the cache depending of executor you are using. The details about it you can get from the gitlab docs