Question on hash generation

[GeeWizWow]

The documentation for hashing describes that amongst other things, the following is taken into account:

• The outputs option specified in the pipeline

Would this not defeat the purpose of remote caching? I.E. would a CI runner having pulled latest, not generate different hashes to a developer who happens to have output present on their machine?

Or is the idea that CI would exclusively leverage cache from other CI pipelines runs?

Alternatively would it be considered best practice when using turbo to ensure all output is removed in development environments prior to a pipeline run?

Thanks 👋

[Xenfo]

A pipeline doesn't refer to CI, it's kind of like a plan for turborepo. Eg. if I run build make sure to run lint, then build dependencies, then build target. Remote caching allows you to download the cache from local to CI or any other situation. Eg. if I run build on local machine and have remote caching, it will save locally and be put on a remote server. Then in CI it will download the cache, assuming you have the same hash, that you sent to the remote server from your local machine.

[Xenfo]

Yeah, it should work like that.

[GeeWizWow]

Yeah, it should work like that.

Cool thanks 🙏

In that case, just to confirm, when wanting to leverage remote caching, it's especially important to ensure that anything specified in the outputs option is removed prior to calling a turbo pipeline?

[Xenfo]

Kinda, outputs is want you want restored. Eg. Weback creates a bundle in build, I would want to add it to outputs. TypeScript compiling and making a build info file, I wouldn't cache that so I wouldn't add it to outputs. Anything that's not in outputs and not a few predefined directories, is used for calculating hash.

[GeeWizWow]

Yeah, we're very much in agreement, other than this

Anything that's not in outputs and not a few predefined directories, is used for calculating hash.

seems to go against what's on this page https://turborepo.org/docs/features/caching#hashing, hence why I'm confused

[Xenfo]

Whoops, I think outputs is included but some hardcoded folders aren't.