Skip a pipeline step if it's already cached

[chhansen]

I'm new to pipelines. I have an application which I am trying to write a pipeline for which has client files in another repository. I already have a step working which can download and install dependencies, which takes some time so I want to cache the built client files after npm install.

It seems to be pulling from cache just fine, but it still runs the step which causes an error because the files already exist. How do I skip this step if it's already been cached?

Here is my pipeline only with the step I'm caching:

image: atlassian/default-image:2
pipelines:
  branches:
    staging:
      - step:
          name: client setup
          image: node
          caches:
            - client
          script:
            - cd ../
            - git clone git@bitbucket.org:myorg/client-repo.git
            - cd client-repo
            - git checkout staging
            - npm install
definitions:
  caches:
    client: ../client-repo

The client setup step works the first time I try it, but the clone fails the second time because the client repo folder already exists. How do I make it skip this entire step if it's been pulled from cache?

[chhansen · Accepted solution]

Nevermind I figured out how cache actually works now.

[Nathan Taal]

Yeah.. but how?