Continuous Builds with Drone (or other systems)

Hi everyone!

I've successfully setup a build of my own using the tools provided and everything is running smoothly.
I've run into errors and troubleshooted them etc.

What I want to do now is setup a Drone.io automated build of OpenWRT. I wanted to see if anyone has done this for their own builds and how you did it.

My main issue is the download of everything constantly (it slows everything down and I can see it being a problem when going into the actual setup of the pipeline). I've setup mirrored repos to my local gitea setup like main openwrt and feeds but when you get to actually compiling more downloading occurs and I'm not sure how to go about using cache or deleting stale cache etc.

If anyone has examples of continuous builds (using drone or otherwise) of openwrt it would be awesome, I'm a bit new to this and trying to understand best way forward.

Thanks!

Symlink dl/ to a persistent location. Something like rm -rf dl/ && mkdir -p /home/build/cached-dl && ln -s /home/build/cached-dl dl as pipeline step between cloning/unpacking buildroot and issuing the first make commands.

Gotcha! Ok cool this is perfect. And I see that there's a package hash and version so if the dl file doesn't match it would just download the new one!

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/packages for anyone that comes across this thread in the future that cares! I'll probably post about Drone.io here if i have any success with this.

Thanks @jow