Caching conda environment: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted

[kmiller96]

Hi! 👋 first of all, thanks for creating this action! I use it lots of my work.

I've been looking into speeding up my CI/CD pipelines and am currently investigating using your recommendation to cache the environments to achieve this.

My pipeline has no issues when it goes to save the cache. It also has no issues in finding the cached environments. However, the deserialisation of the cache fails due to some weird permissions issues. The two key lines are:

/usr/bin/tar: ../../../../../usr/share/miniconda/envs: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted
/usr/bin/tar: ../../../../../usr/share/miniconda/envs: Cannot change mode to rwxr-xr-x: Operation not permitted
/usr/bin/tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

There is an unanswered stack exchange question posing this same question so I know it's not an isolated issue.

Here is what my configuration looks like:

jobs:
  example:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    
    ...

    jobs:
      - name: Checkout Repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      ...

      - name: Setup Mamba
        uses: conda-incubator/setup-miniconda@v2
        with:
          python-version: 3.9
          channels: conda-forge
          channel-priority: flexible

          mamba-version: "*"
          use-mamba: true

          auto-activate-base: false
          activate-environment: myenv

      - name: Set environment variables used in cache
        run: |
          echo "DATE=$(date +'%Y%m%d')" >> $GITHUB_ENV

      - name: Cache Mamba
        id: cache
        uses: actions/cache@v3
        env:
          CACHE_NUMBER: 0 # Increment this number if you wish to hard-refresh the cache.
        with:
          path: /usr/share/miniconda/envs
          key: conda-${{ env.DATE }}-${{ env.CACHE_NUMBER }}

      - name: Install development dependencies (if invalid cache)
        run: conda env update -n myenv -f environment.yaml
        if: steps.cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'

      ...

I have hard coded the cache paths as I couldn't quite get the templated ${{ env.CONDA }} to work for some reason, but I'm going to tackle that problem separately from this issue.

Any advice on how to solve this problem? Any and all help is appreciated!

[msamo-n]

Hi.
My solution is not to cache whole /usr/share/miniconda/envs, but only /usr/share/miniconda/envs/my-shiny-env. Seems working.