Proposal: allow disabling package manager caching

[MikeMcC399]

• follows on from suggestion in Package manager caching strategy for pnpm and Yarn Modern #1366

What would you like?

• Provide an action option to disable package manager caching when installing dependencies
• Add / modify example workflows to demonstrate using package manager caching from GitHub Actions' actions/setup-node

Why is this needed?

cypress-io/github-action caches package manager dependencies for:

• npm
• Yarn v1 Classic

and offers no equivalent built-in functionality for:

• pnpm
• Yarn Modern

If a pnpm lockfile pnpm-lock.yaml is detected, the action caches the npm cache, not the pnpm cache, leading to a potentially incorrect Cypress version usage in npx verify steps. For projects with pnpm workspaces, this means that the action cannot be used to install dependencies (see description of failure condition in #1594 (comment)). Instead dependencies must be installed using pnpm install commands directly.

GitHub Actions offers a full suite of setup-* actions to cache dependencies of commonly-used package managers.

For Cypress, the relevant caching action is actions/setup-node which offers caching for npm, Yarn (v1 and Modern) and pnpm.

Duplicating the capability from actions/setup-node into cypress-io/github-action for pnpm and Yarn would involve a significant re-write and on-going action maintenance effort, so this would not be a recommended resolution strategy.

Other

Relates to:

• Package manager caching strategy for pnpm and Yarn Modern #1366
• Add workspace support for pnpm #1144
• Allow disabling cache #953

[MikeMcC399]

I have this more or less prepared. I'd like to get caching updated before testing submitting any PR and I'm currently waiting on GitHub Actions updating their repos first. Hopefully they will make some progress this month.

[MikeMcC399]

• PR feat: add boolean option package-manager-cache #1641 now submitted

[MikeMcC399]

• PR feat: add boolean option package-manager-cache #1641 is currently incompletely released. See Release 7.1.0 failed 401 error updating GitHub #1642

It should however be usable with an explicit version actions/github-action@v7.1.0
Currently, using actions/github-action@v7 selects actions/github-action@v7.0.0

[eivindsjursen-lab]

This feels very close to the kind of cache drift that is easy to miss early in CI: the workflow still mostly works, but the package manager cache strategy is no longer aligned with the actual dependency layout, and things start failing or getting less reliable in ways that are hard to spot from a single run.

I’ve been testing a small GitHub Action that warns on cache regressions across runs — things like key churn, lower reuse, and restore-time changes — and posts a short summary when behaviour shifts.

Not suggesting it as a fix for the caching strategy here, just as a lightweight way to make this class of problem more visible earlier.

Repo:
https://github.com/eivindsjursen-lab/gates-suite-public-beta

If useful, I can share a very small warn-only example for a pnpm/workspace-style workflow?