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sccache - Shared Compilation Cache
sccache is a ccache-like compiler caching tool. It is used as a compiler wrapper and avoids compilation when possible, storing cached results either on local disk or in one of several cloud storage backends. Multi-level caching with automatic backfill is supported for hierarchical cache architectures (see Multi-Level Cache).
sccache includes support for caching the compilation of Assembler, C/C++ code, Rust, as well as NVIDIA's CUDA using nvcc, and clang, AMD's ROCm HIP.
sccache also provides icecream-style distributed compilation (automatic packaging of local toolchains) for all supported compilers (including Rust). The distributed compilation system includes several security features that icecream lacks such as authentication, transport layer encryption, and sandboxed compiler execution on build servers. See the distributed quickstart guide for more information.
sccache is also available as a GitHub Actions to facilitate the deployment using GitHub Actions cache.
Table of Contents (ToC)
Installation
Usage
Build Requirements
Build
Separating caches between invocations
Overwriting the cache
Debugging
Interaction with GNU make jobserver
Known Caveats
Storage Options
Multi-Level (Hierarchical Caching)
Local
S3
R2
Redis
Memcached
Google Cloud Storage
Azure
GitHub Actions
WebDAV (Ccache/Bazel/Gradle compatible)
Alibaba OSS
Tencent Cloud Object Storage
Installation
There are prebuilt x86-64 binaries available for Windows, Linux (a portable binary compiled against musl), and macOS on the releases page. Several package managers also include sccache packages, you can install the latest release from source using cargo, or build directly from a source checkout.
macOS
On macOS sccache can be installed via Homebrew:
brew install sccache
or via MacPorts:
sudo port install sccache
Windows
On Windows, sccache can be installed via scoop:
scoop install sccache
or winget:
winget install Mozilla.sccache
Via cargo
If you have a Rust toolchain installed you can install sccache using cargo. Note that this will compile sccache from source which is fairly resource-intensive. For CI purposes you should use prebuilt binary packages.
cargo install sccache --locked
Or, using cargo-binstall to install a prebuilt binary:
cargo binstall sccache
With Nix
Sccache is available in nixpkgs, so if you don't need the latest version you can use that:
buildInputs = [ pkgs.sccache ];
We also provide a flake with an overlay for getting the latest version:
{
inputs = {
nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
sccache = {
url = "github:mozilla/sccache";
inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
};
};
outputs = { self, nixpkgs, sccache, ... }:
let
system = "x86_64-linux";
pkgs = import nixpkgs {
inherit system;
overlays = [ sccache.overlays.default ];
};
in {
devShells.${system}.default = pkgs.mkShell {
buildInputs = [ pkgs.sccache ];
};
};
}
Or use it directly from the flake without the overlay:
nix run github:mozilla/sccache -- --help
nix shell github:mozilla/sccache
Usage
Running sccache is like running ccache: prefix your compilation commands with it, like so:
sccache gcc -o foo.o -c foo.c
If you want to use sccache for caching Rust builds you can define build.rustc-wrapper in the
cargo configuration file. For example, you can set it globally
in $HOME/.cargo/config.toml by adding:
[build]
rustc-wrapper = "/path/to/sccache"
Note that you need to use cargo 1.40 or newer for this to work.
Alternatively you can use the environment variable RUSTC_WRAPPER:
export RUSTC_WRAPPER=/path/to/sccache
cargo build
sccache supports gcc, clang, MSVC, rustc, NVCC, NVC++, hipcc, and Wind River's diab compiler. Both gcc and msvc support Response Files, read more about their implementation here.
If you don't specify otherwise, sccache will use a local disk cache.
sccache works using a client-server model, where the server runs locally on the same machine as the client. The client-server model allows the server to be more efficient by keeping some state in memory. The sccache command will spawn a server process if one is not already running, or you can run sccache --start-server to start the background server process without performing any compilation.
By default sccache server will listen on 127.0.0.1:4226, you can specify environment variable SCCACHE_SERVER_PORT to use a different port or SCCACHE_SERVER_UDS to listen on unix domain socket. Abstract unix socket is also supported as long as the path is escaped following the format. For example:
% env SCCACHE_SERVER_UDS=$HOME/sccache.sock sccache --start-server # unix socket
% env SCCACHE_SERVER_UDS=\\x00sccache.sock sccache --start-server # abstract unix socket
You can run sccache --stop-server to terminate the server. It will also terminate after (by default) 10 minutes of inactivity.
Running sccache --show-stats will print a summary of cache statistics.
Some notes about using sccache with Jenkins are here.
To use sccache with cmake, provide the following command line arguments to cmake 3.4 or newer:
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache
The process for using sccache with MSVC and cmake, depends on which version of cmake you're using. For versions of cmake 3.24 and earlier, to generate PDB files for debugging with MSVC, you can use the /Z7 option. Alternatively, the /Zi option together with /Fd can work if /Fd names a different PDB file name for each object file created. Note that CMake sets /Zi by default, so if you use CMake, you can use /Z7 by adding code like this in your CMakeLists.txt:
if(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL "Debug")
string(REPLACE "/Zi" "/Z7" CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG}")
string(REPLACE "/Zi" "/Z7" CMAKE_C_FLAGS_DEBUG "${CMAKE_C_FLAGS_DEBUG}")
elseif(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL "Release")
string(REPLACE "/Zi" "/Z7" CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE}")
string(R
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