Use cache with multiple image in gitlab CICD

Question

I am making a gitlab CI/CD pipeline that uses two different image.

One of them necessitate the installations of some package using npm. In order to avoid multiple-time installation I've added some cache.

Let's see this example :

stages:
    - build
    - quality

cache:
    paths:
        - node_modules/

build-one:
  image: node:latest
  stage: build
  script:
    - npm install <some package>

build-two:
  image: foo_image:latest
  stage: build
  script:
    - some cmd

quality:
  image: node:latest
  stage: quality
  script:
    - <some cmd using the previously installed package>

The fact of having two different docker images forces me to specify it inside the job definition. So from my tests the cache isn't actually used and the command executed by the quality job will fail because the package isn't installed.

Is there a solution to this problem ?

Many thanks ! Kev'.

Answer 1

There can be two cases

1. Same runner is being used to run all the jobs. In this case the way to specified cache should work fine.

2. Different runners are being used to run different jobs. So suppose build job runs with runner 1 and quality jobs is running with runner 2 so the cache will only be present in runner 1.

In order to make use of caching in case 2 you will have to use distributed caching. Then runner 1 will run the build job it will push the cache to s3 and runner 2 will pull with cache during the quality job and then can use that.