configuring cache dir

[unional]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?
Feature

What is the current behavior?
yarn currently save cached packages in a default directory: /Users/<user>/Library/Caches/yarn or C:/Users/<user>/AppData/Local/Yarn/cache.

When a lot of packages are cached, each user on the system to consume a lot of space on the primary drive.

I would like to config yarn to save cache packages in a backup drive which has a lot more space, and may cache packages from all users in the same location (as discussed in #2125)

What is the expected behavior?
yarn config set cache-dir <location>

Please mention your node.js, yarn and operating system version.
yarn: 0.17.6

[unional]

I notice there is a yarn --cache-folder <path> to specify a custom cache folder for the particular project. But this is different as I'm suggestion to make the default location configurable.

By the way, --cache-folder and yarn cache dir is not consistent in term of wording: folder vs dir

[willxy]

Running into this myself just now, yarn config set cache-folder <location> seems to effectively set the cache dir default.

[Couto]

Slightly related but is it possible to configure the cache dir as a command flag during the installation process?

e.g.: yarn install --cache-folder=/opt/project/.local-yarn-cache

This is useful in some CI environments where you can't write outside of the project's folder.

---

After some investigation, I've noticed that --cache-folder is the correct flag, but since Yarn still tries to write the .config folder outside of the project directory, it will always fail in my use cases.

[wakeful]

@Couto you can work around .config location by simply overwriting the $HOME env variable before running yarn

e.g.: HOME=$(pwd) yarn install

[chapterjason]

Using

--cache-folder "<path>"
--cache-dir "<path>"
--cache "<path>"
cache-folder "<path>"
cache-dir "<path>"
cache "<path>"

None of them work.

Also https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/cli/cache/#toc-change-the-cache-path-for-yarn does not work.

Same goes for global folder but --global-folder is working under 1.13.0

[hugmanrique]

wakeful's solution didn't work inside a node:current-alpine Docker image for some reason. Instead of overriding the HOME env var, we did the following:

yarn config set cache-folder $(pwd)/.yarn-cache

This will set an absolute path in a global config, but it should be fine for CI configs (our use case).

[slykar]

The absolute path seems to do the job of actually setting this config value to what you might want to use.

root@9ad1edf1833c:/home# yarn config set cache-folder .my-cache
root@9ad1edf1833c:/home# yarn cache dir
/usr/local/share/.my-cache/v6

root@9ad1edf1833c:/home# yarn config set cache-folder $(pwd)/.my-cache
root@9ad1edf1833c:/home# yarn cache dir
/home/.my-cache/v6

[zoidyzoidzoid]

We use the YARN_CACHE_DIR env var and it seems to work, though you'd expect that to be the same as --cache-dir.

[mpdude]

Is that really YARN_CACHE_DIR, or rather YARN_CACHE_FOLDER?

[phil-lgr]

Should be YARN_CACHE_FOLDER according to the docs: https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/cache/#toc-change-the-cache-path-for-yarn