# Does act\_runner cache cloned actions?

**URL:** <https://forum.gitea.com/t/does-act-runner-cache-cloned-actions/11553>\
**Category:** Actions\
**Created:** [July 25, 2025, 3:56am UTC](https://forum.gitea.com/t/does-act-runner-cache-cloned-actions/11553 "2025-07-25T03:56:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![DrXiao](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.gitea.com/drxiao/32/7015_2.png) [@DrXiao](https://forum.gitea.com/u/DrXiao)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2025, 3:56am UTC](https://forum.gitea.com/t/does-act-runner-cache-cloned-actions/11553/1 "2025-07-25T03:56:53Z")

</div>

I want to ask a question about `act_runner`’s behavior.

- Gitea: `v1.24.2`
- `act_runner`: based on `v0.2.12`
  - We only add a new commit to build our custom `act_runner` so that our runner can run under offline mode.

Our team uses Gitea and `act_runner` to manage our repositories and perform CI/CD to ensure quality. Then, due to our custom requirements, we create a repository and make our action on our Gitea server so that our projects can use this shared action to perform certain checks.

This action repository sets `v1.0.0` tag and create a `v1` branch at the beginning. We make `v1,0.0` tag and `v1` branch point to the same commit.

Thus, our projects can add a step to use this shared action as follows

```yaml
steps:
  - name: Checkout code
    uses: actions/checkout@v4

  - name: Common checks
    uses: http://our.gitea.server/actions/common-checker@v1

```

in their workflow to perform certain common checks. Notice that `v1` branch points to the commit where the `v1.0.0` tag is.

However, after adding several patches, the action repository sets a new tag `v1.1.0` and updates the `v1` branch to point to the latest commit. We expect that our projects **don’t need to modify the step** , and the workflows will naturally use `common-checker@v1.1.0` to perform the checks because `v1` branch has pointed to the commit where the `v1.1.0` tag is.

But, unexpectedly, we found that `act_runner` still uses `common-checker@v1.0.0` to perform the checks, and I think it means that `act_runner` doesn’t fetch the updated `v1` branch.

Therefore, as the title stated, **does `act_runner` cache cloned actions?** Because our shared action may update frequently, we hope that `act_runner` can fetch the updated branches/tags to perform the check.
