Hello @mbrandenburger, can I start working on this?

Hi @osamamagdy, yes please give it a try.

Thanks @mbrandenburger. I started by investigating how to solve the issue. Here is what I found:

1. To cache any folder with github actions we need to configure a cache key and a path for the artifacts to be cached upon every execution of the pipeline. Normally for projects using golang, it would be $GOPATH/pkg/mod, and if $GOPATH=~/go the caching step would be
   - name: Cache Go dependencies uses: actions/cache@v2 with: path: ~/go/pkg/mod key: ${{ runner.os }}-go-${{ hashFiles('**/go.sum') }}
2. The most time-consuming step is the run make inside dev container step.
3. Since the go dependencies installation is running inside a docker container, we can mount a volume to the location where the packages are installed ($GOPATH value inside the container is /project) and cache it on the runner itself -v /project/pkg/mod:~/go/mod/pkg
4. I locally tried to leave the container running and run go mod download outside and then copy the directory to the container and it didn't take time to install the dependencies

Would this approach affect the running container by any means? like it would fail tests for some reason?

This looks like the right direction to me. 💪

In addition to the go deps, we may also think about caching other artifacts we consume (i.e., fabric binaries, docker images)

@mbrandenburger Thanks. I am trying to activate the volume mount in the pipeline by assigning a value to DOCKER_DEV_RUN_OPTS before calling the make file like here
I assumed this should work as the makefile is using the ?= operator in here so if the variable is set it should only append to it. but this doesn't seem to work as the make command here is not as expected

@mbrandenburger It worked by adding a new variable to the make file and appending it to the DOCKER_DEV_RUN_OPTS. Is this acceptable? can you review PR #762 I will revert the changes to the workflow triggers before the changes are merged

@osamamagdy thanks! I will look into this asap!

I re-opened the issue to capture other options for caching.

Thanks @osamamagdy for improving CI caching with the go mod package caching. 🚀💪🎉