How can caching and artifacts speed up Operators on GitLab CI?

Caching and artifacts in GitLab CI can greatly speed up the process of running Operators by reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks, minimizing the need for redundant resource fetching, and making the build pipeline more efficient.

By utilizing caching, you can store dependencies and files that don't change often, so that they don't need to be downloaded or generated again in subsequent pipelines. Artifacts, on the other hand, allow you to pass files from one job to another, thereby saving time and effort in building components multiple times.

Example:

stages: - build - test cache: paths: - vendor/ - node_modules/ build_job: stage: build script: - composer install - npm install artifacts: paths: - build/ test_job: stage: test dependencies: - build_job script: - vendor/bin/phpunit

caching artifacts GitLab CI Operators DevOps CI/CD