Cache NVM Install on CircleCI

The Problem

Lately, Node downloads via nvm have been failing on CircleCI. There have been several issues opened on their GitHub repo that have since been closed and locked. However, the issue still persists.

The failure looks something like this:

Found '/home/circleci/project/.nvmrc' with version <v18.13.0>
Downloading and installing node v18.13.0...
Downloading https://nodejs.org/dist/v18.13.0/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz...
###                                                                        4.8%curl: (92) HTTP/2 stream 0 was not closed cleanly: INTERNAL_ERROR (err 2)

Binary download from https://nodejs.org/dist/v18.13.0/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz failed, trying source.
grep: /opt/circleci/.nvm/.cache/bin/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz: No such file or directory
Provided file to checksum does not exist.
Binary download failed, trying source.
Detected that you have 8 CPU core(s)
Running with 7 threads to speed up the build

Luckily, you can work around this issue by caching the Node tarball.

Caching NVM

To cache the nvm resources, utilize the restore_cache and save_cache steps in your CircleCI config.

This is an example of caching the nvm resources for the ubuntu-2204:2023.02.1 arm executor:

- restore_cache:
    name: Restore nvm cache
    keys:
      # Invalidate the cache based on architecture, the version of Node defined in `nvmrc` and the branch name
      - v1-nvm-cache-{{ arch }}-{{ checksum ".nvmrc" }}-{{ .Branch }}
      # Fall back to the latest cache if no exact match is found
      - v1-nvm-cache-{{ arch }}-{{ checksum ".nvmrc" }}-
- run: nvm install
- save_cache:
    name: Save nvm cache
    key: v1-nvm-cache-{{ arch }}-{{ checksum ".nvmrc" }}-{{ .Branch }}
    paths:
      - /opt/circleci/.nvm/.cache

With a warm cache, you’ll see the nvm install step using the cached tarball:

Found '/home/circleci/project/.nvmrc' with version <v18.13.0>
Downloading and installing node v18.13.0...
Local cache found: ${NVM_DIR}/.cache/bin/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz
Checksums match! Using existing downloaded archive ${NVM_DIR}/.cache/bin/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64/node-v18.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz
Now using node v18.13.0 (npm v8.19.3)

This significantly speeds up your build process, reduces traffic on the npmjs.org servers, and avoids transient 500 errors.

NOTE: You only need to run an nvm install process on machine executors. If you can manage, prefer using a docker executor with a Node image (e.g., cimg/node).

Cache NVM Install on CircleCI

The Problem

Caching NVM

Keywords

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