Sharing Directory between builds aka sharing node_modules

Question

yarn takes a lot of time on vsts hosted agent due to more than few dependencies .

Our monorepo contains three somewhat identical but totally different apps which share lot of node dependencies.

Each app is very huge and takes considerable time to build. So we build individual app based on path filter

Release contains artifacts from all three builds

What I need

• download node modules once
• use same downloaded dependencies in three different conditional builds
• release app after all or any build with artifacts latest for each build

any pointers how to configure this

Answer 1

There isn't any way to do this with Hosted Agent. The Hosted Agent is a group of virtual machines hosted on Azure. Every time you queue a new build, it will initialize an available agent from these machines with a clean environment. So the build machine you used may different for every build. And when the build is finished, the files downloaded/generated during the build will also be cleared. So there isn't any way to share the files between them.