Question

Your team's Azure DevOps YAML pipeline restores npm dependencies on every run, adding roughly 4 minutes per build. You want to speed up subsequent runs by reusing the previously downloaded packages across pipeline runs, while ensuring the cache is automatically invalidated whenever the dependency lock file changes. Which approach should you implement?

Accepted Answer

Add a Cache@2 task with a key that includes a hash of package-lock.json and points the path to the npm cache folder, placed before the npm install step.

Answer

Publish the node_modules folder with the PublishBuildArtifacts@1 task and download it at the start of each new run using DownloadBuildArtifacts@0.

Answer

Store node_modules in an Azure Artifacts universal package feed and use the UniversalPackages@0 task to download it before each build.

Answer

Enable pipeline retention policies to keep the previous run's workspace so the agent reuses the existing node_modules directory.