Remote persistent cache / "Zero builds"

[matzeeable]

Hey webpack team! 😊

Intro

I love the persistent caching mechanism since webpack@5. I just have some thoughts in my head, and I need some more insight into the functionality of the current cache implementation of webpack and want to know if something like this would be possible. I will try to explain my idea...

The idea of "Zero builds"

I stumbled over the so-called "Zero installs" of yarn and they follow the idea to hold the yarn cache in a remote destination (in yarn's case the GIT repository). I think something like this could make sense also in webpack.

Benefits

• This allows developers to switch between branches without spending the time with build times
• This allows developers across multiple machines to use existing build caches; I build our project, my college make use of the existing cache
• In a CI environment, we can use existing caches across multiple branches

Possible scenario

Let's "unroll" this behavior on Webpack as well and imagine the following scenario:

1. Checkout GIT branch feat/my-feature
2. Start webpack build without any cache
3. Webpack will create a cache for our current source code
4. Webpack will upload the cache artifacts to a cache repository (this could be e.g. a S3 bucket)
5. Checkout GIT branch feat/another-feature
6. Start webpack build - at this time we have a modified source code but the old cache of feat/my-feature
7. Webpack will create a cache for our current source code
8. Webpack will upload the cache artifacts to our cache repository
9. We need to work again on feat/my-feature and check it out
10. Start webpack build - at this time we have a modified source code but the old cache of feat/another-feature
11. Webpack will detect that there is a cache artifact in our remote repository and downloads it instead of building again

What do you think of this idea? I think many users could benefit from this.