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Before we used to use a monolithic cache in gitlab
```  cache:
    - key: "$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME" # per branch caching
      fallback_keys:
        - "$CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH"
      paths:
        - $GRADLE_USER_HOME/caches/modules-*/files-*
        - $GRADLE_USER_HOME/caches/modules-*/metadata-*```


But now our cache is invalid at the end of every build.

Perhaps we’re hitting <https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/12493>

Here are some of them with versions:
<https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/platforms/software/dependency-management/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/CacheLayout.java|https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/platforms/software/dependency-managem[…]a/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/CacheLayout.java>

So `metadata-*` didn't change since 8.2, `transforms-` changed to `transforms-4` with 8.6 though (although that doesn't matter if you want to cache just dependencies)

I’m trying to cache whatever makes gradle builds the fastest :wink:

Specifically base off of the docs here <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_resolution.html#sub:cache_copy>

In the docs it says you can cache modules-&lt;version&gt;

We’ve previously been caching files-* and metadata-*, as opposed to manually filtering out *.lock or gc.properties files

perhaps check the caching logic in gradle-build-action (for GitHub), see what is cached there.

Looks like it caches all of the caches directory <https://github.com/gradle/gradle-build-action/blob/585b565652cefbba63202a7f927df0ff99f34001/action.yml#L42C1-L47C22>

there’s further refinement deeper in the code somewhere on the specifics iirc