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Caching

If you have many repos, runs may approach the GitHub API rate limit. Caching skips re-fetching commits for repos that haven't been pushed to since the last run.

How to enable

Add an actions/cache@v4 step before the action and set ENABLE_CACHE: "true":

jobs:
  update:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Restore cache
        uses: actions/cache@v4
        with:
          path: .github-stats-cache.json
          key: github-stats-${{ github.run_id }}
          restore-keys: github-stats-

      - uses: thanhhaudev/github-stats@v1
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}
          SHOW_METRICS: "COMMIT_TIMES_OF_DAY,LANGUAGE_PER_REPO"
          ENABLE_CACHE: "true"

⚠️ Add .github-stats-cache.json to your profile repo's .gitignore. The cache holds repo URLs (including private), commit metadata, and WakaTime stats such as project/language/editor names — fine inside GitHub Actions cache, not fine inside your public profile repo.

How it works

  • The action stores fetched repo metadata + commits in CACHE_FILE (.github-stats-cache.json by default).
  • Each run queries every repo's pushedAt. Unchanged repos reuse cached commits and skip the API calls.
  • When WakaTime is enabled, successful WakaTime stats are also cached. If a later WakaTime response is still processing (202, pending_update, or is_up_to_date=false), the action reuses the cached WakaTime stats and still updates GitHub-based metrics. If only the all-time endpoint is processing, the freshly fetched stats are kept and just the all-time figure falls back to cache.
  • Cached repos that no longer exist (deleted, transferred) are pruned automatically.
  • The repo-commit cache and the WakaTime snapshot are versioned independently. A repo-commit schema upgrade re-fetches commits but keeps the WakaTime snapshot; a WakaTime schema upgrade does the reverse.
  • Toggling ONLY_MAIN_BRANCH invalidates only the cached commits (the two modes return different commit sets); the WakaTime snapshot is unaffected.

Trade-offs

  • GitHub evicts caches after 7 days of inactivity.
  • The first run after a cache miss is as slow as today — caching only helps subsequent runs.
  • On the first run with no cached WakaTime data, a stale WakaTime response means WakaTime blocks are omitted for that run while GitHub metrics continue to update.

Security

GitHub Actions cache is scoped to the repo and requires authenticated access. It is not publicly readable, even on public repos. Workflows from forked PRs cannot access the cache (GitHub enforces this).