Remote Caching

Turborepo's task cache saves time by never doing the same work twice.

But there's a problem: the cache is local to your machine. When you're working with a Continuous Integration system, this can result in a lot of duplicated work:

Since Turborepo only caches to the local filesystem by default, the same task (turbo run build) must be re-executed on each machine (by you, by your teammates, by your CI, by your PaaS, etc.) even when all of the task inputs are identical — which wastes time and resources.

A single, shared cache

What if you could share a single Turborepo cache across your entire team (and even your CI)?

By working with providers like Vercel, Turborepo can securely communicate with a remote cache - a cloud server that stores the results of your tasks.

This can save enormous amounts of time by preventing duplicated work across your entire organization.

Vercel

For Local Development

To link your local Turborepo to your Remote Cache, authenticate the Turborepo CLI with your Vercel account:

turbo login

You can also use your package manager if you do not have global turbo installed:

npx turbo login

Now, link your Turborepo to your Remote Cache:

turbo link

Once enabled, make some changes to a package you are currently caching and run tasks against it with turbo run. Your cache artifacts will now be stored locally and in your Remote Cache.

To verify, delete your local Turborepo cache with:

rm -rf ./.turbo/cache

Then, run the same build again. If things are working properly, turbo should not execute tasks locally. Instead, it will download the logs and artifacts from your Remote Cache and replay them back to you.

Remote Caching on Vercel

If you are building and hosting your apps on Vercel, Remote Caching will be automatically set up on your behalf once you use turbo. Refer to the Vercel documentation for more information.

Artifact Integrity and Authenticity Verification

Turborepo can sign artifacts with a secret key before uploading them to the Remote Cache. Turborepo uses HMAC-SHA256 signatures on artifacts using a secret key you provide. Turborepo will verify the Remote Cache artifacts' integrity and authenticity when they're downloaded. Any artifacts that fail to verify will be ignored and treated as a cache miss by Turborepo.

To enable this feature, set the remoteCache options on your turbo.json config to include signature: true. Then specify your secret key by declaring the TURBO_REMOTE_CACHE_SIGNATURE_KEY environment variable.

{
  "remoteCache": {
    "signature": true
  }
}

Remote Cache API

A Remote Cache can be implemented by any HTTP server that meets Turborepo's Remote Caching API specification.

Managed Remote Cache with Vercel

Vercel, the creators and maintainers of Turborepo, provide a managed Remote Cache that is fully compatible with Turborepo.

Using Vercel Remote Cache is zero-configuration and automatically integrates with Vercel deployments through the open-source Vercel Remote Cache SDK.

Learn more about Turborepo on Vercel or deploy a template for free to try it out.

Self-hosting

You can also self-host your own Remote Cache and set the remote caching domain by specifying the --api and --token flags, where --api is the hostname and --token is a bearer token.

turbo login --api="https://my-server.example.com/api"
turbo link --api="https://my-server-example.com"
turbo run build --api="https://my-server.example.com" --token="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Alternatively, the TURBO_API and TURBO_TOKEN System Environment Variables can be used to set the respective values for the Remote Cache once you've logged in.

You can find the OpenAPI specification for the API here. At this time, all versions of turbo are compatible with the v8 endpoints.