The custom g3-cache
has been introduced in the second version (G3v2) of the sibling project accetto/ubuntu-vnc-xfce-g3.
The local g3-cache
is an additional cache used by the building pipeline and it should not be confused with the Docker builder cache maintained by the Docker Build itself.
The g3-cache
stores the selected pre-downloaded packages used by the Dockerfiles, that would be otherwise repeatedly downloaded from the external sources by each build.
It results in a significantly higher performance by building sets of images or by repeated builds.
You can learn more about the concept on the sibling Wiki page "Concepts of g3-cache
" and about the implementation on the sibling Wiki page "How g3-cache
works".
If you are on Windows, you can encounter the problem of missing wget
utility.
It is used by refreshing the g3-cache
and it's available on Linux by default.
On Windows you have generally two choices.
You can build your images inside the WSL
environment or you can download the wget.exe
application for Windows.
Make sure to update also the PATH
environment variable appropriately.
The local g3-cache
of this project has the following cache sections:
novnc
tigervnc
websockify
The local g3-cache
folder docker/.g3-cache
is excluded from the commits into the git
repository by the means of the .gitignore
file.
You can delete the local g3-cache
folder any time, because it will be re-created each time you build an image.
The absolute path to the root folder of the shared g3-cache
should be set as the value of the environment variable SHARED_G3_CACHE_PATH
.
The same shared g3-cache
is usually used also by the sibling projects, for example accetto/ubuntu-vnc-xfce-g3, accetto/headless-drawing-g3 and accetto/headless-coding-g3.
Both g3-caches
are refreshed by the helper script cache
, which is stored in the folder docker/hooks/
.
Therefore it's sometimes referenced as a hook script.
The script is used by the hook scripts pre_build
and build
.
However, it can be executed also stand-alone.
Remark: The current implementation of the cache refreshing code is not thread safe and it is not intended for parallel building of multiple images.