Is there a way to cache the installed conda?

[tbenthompson]

I'm currently using environment caching to speed up by CI runs as described by: https://github.com/conda-incubator/setup-miniconda#caching-environments

But, the installation of conda itself takes about a minute of runtime on our CI. It would be nice to cache this step since we do not need to check for new miniconda versions every run - once a day or once a week would be more than sufficient.

It's not clear to me if there's a way to achieve this. I can use the cache action to cache the installed directory, but then putting the setup-miniconda action inside an if statement would be problematic because it would also lose the environment activation behavior.

Thanks for any help!

[goanpeca]

Hi @tbenthompson,

Regarding:

But, the installation of conda itself takes about a minute of runtime on our CI

if you do not require the "latest" miniconda, you could just use the bundled one that comes with all runners, so there would not be any installation step!

[tbenthompson]

Oh, that's a good point. Thanks. I guess this can be closed then! Maybe it would be good to have a note on runtime in the documentation that using "latest" will be much slower. It makes sense in retrospect, but I didn't think of it until now.

[goanpeca]

Will make the update, thanks for the suggestion.

Reopening the issue to track it :)