Does act_runner cache cloned actions?

Actions
1

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

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.