Allow global cache exclusions in cacheOptions

Ideas
1

Hi all, we’ve run into a gap in Tuist’s cache configuration.

Today, cacheOptions already gives us a few useful controls:

  • profiles.default lets us pick the default cache behavior, which is onlyExternal by default

  • custom profiles can use allPossible / onlyExternal / none

  • custom profiles can also add targetQueries and exceptTargetQueries

That works well when you want to choose a profile.

The problem we’re trying to solve is slightly different: we want to preserve Tuist’s existing command defaults, but also declare that a small set of targets should never be eligible for binary caching, which currently is an issue when using tuist test.

In our case:

  • plain tuist generate should keep its current default behavior (.onlyExternal)

  • focused tuist generate <targets> should keep its current focused behavior (.allPossible)

  • tuist test <scheme> should keep its current behavior (.allPossible)

  • but a handful of Firebase / Firestore-related targets should always stay source-based, even for tuist test, which they don’t currently

So this feels less like “we need another profile”, and more like “we need a global exclusion list that composes with whatever cache behavior the command would normally use.”

A strawman API could be:

cacheOptions: .options(
exceptTargetQueries: [
"FirebaseAnalyticsTarget",
"FirebaseAnalyticsWrapper",
"FirebaseFirestoreTarget",
"FirebaseFirestore",
"FirebaseFirestoreInternalWrapper",
"FirebaseSharedSwift",
"leveldb",
"nanopb",
]
)

Intended behavior:

  • preserve current command defaults

  • never replace these targets with cached binaries

  • also exclude them from tuist cache warm

This seems like a small, backwards-compatible addition to cacheOptions, and more direct than trying to encode this through custom profiles.

Does this seem like a reasonable direction?

Other options considered

Adding a new inherited base profile like .commandDefault

Example:

cacheOptions: .options(
profiles: .profiles(
[
"firebase-workaround": .profile(
.commandDefault,
except: [
"FirebaseFirestore",
"FirebaseFirestoreTarget",
"FirebaseAnalyticsTarget",
]
)
],
default: "firebase-workaround"
)
)

This seems to solve my issue, but isn’t strictly backwards compatible / would potentially change behavior if a user were to run tuist test with an already configured cacheOptions, since as of now tuist test implicitly overrides any cacheOptions to .allPossible.

2

To be clear, I’m down to implement this, I was just looking for some API guidance before I went forward with an implementation.