@sphido/cache

Incremental builds for Sphido: one question — has this page changed since the last build? — so a rebuild costs what changed, not what the site contains. No third-party dependencies; fs.stat and, if you ask for it, SHA-1.

Install

pnpm add @sphido/cache

Example

#!/usr/bin/env node

import { allPages, getPages, writeFile } from '@sphido/core';
import { frontmatter } from '@sphido/frontmatter';
import { markdown } from '@sphido/markdown';
import { changed, writeCache } from '@sphido/cache';
import { layout } from './layout.js';

const pages = await getPages({path: 'content'}, frontmatter, markdown());

for (const page of allPages(pages)) {
	page.output = `public/${page.name}.html`;

	if (!(await changed(page))) continue; // output is up to date

	await writeFile(page.output, layout(page));
}

await writeCache(); // only after the build got this far

State lives in .sphido/cache.json — add it to .gitignore.

API

changed(page, options?): Promise<boolean>

true when the page has to be rebuilt: its source is new or newer, the state is unknown, the source cannot be read, or — when page.output is already set — the output file is missing. Recording the page's state is a side effect, so writeCache() persists exactly the pages the build looked at.

Set page.output before calling changed() and a deleted output brings the page back, so rm -rf public followed by a rebuild regenerates the site instead of trusting a cache that is right about sources and wrong about results.

writeCache(options?): Promise<void>

Persists what changed() collected, atomically (temporary file plus rename, so an interrupted build cannot leave a truncated cache). Call it after a successful build — a half-written site with a fully-written cache skips the rest forever.

In a long-lived process such as @sphido/dev, the state written becomes what the next rebuild compares against.

removed(options?): string[]

Paths the previous build recorded and this one never saw — sources that are gone while their outputs are not. Call it before writeCache(), which forgets the previous state:

import { unlink } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { removed, writeCache } from '@sphido/cache';

for (const path of removed()) {
	await unlink(path.replace('content', 'public').replace(/\.md$/, '.html')).catch(() => {});
}

await writeCache();

resetCache(options?): void

Forgets the in-memory state for a cache file; the next changed() reads it from disk again. Useful in tests.

Options

changed(page, {
	file: '.sphido/cache.json',  // where the state is persisted
	strategy: 'mtime',           // 'mtime' | 'hash'
	version: undefined,          // global key — change it to invalidate every page
})

Pass the same options to changed(), removed() and writeCache(); each cache file keeps its own state.

Strategies

mtime is the default because a build that rebuilds too much is merely slow, while one that rebuilds too little ships stale HTML — and after a git checkout or a cp -r, mtimes move even when content does not, which errs the safe way. Reach for hash when your content is generated or copied around and you want writes that changed nothing to stay free.

Invalidating everything

The cache tracks content sources, not your templates. Change layout.js and every page needs rebuilding, so hand its state to version:

import { createHash } from 'node:crypto';
import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';

const version = createHash('sha1')
	.update(await readFile('layout.js'))
	.update(await readFile('build.js'))
	.digest('hex');

if (!(await changed(page, {version}))) continue;

A different version — or a different strategy, a missing file, unparseable JSON — leaves every page changed. Errors always fall that way: a rebuild too many, never a page too few.

With @sphido/dev

@sphido/dev calls your build() on every save, so caching is something build() opts into — nothing to configure:

// build.js
export async function build() {
	const pages = await getPages({path: 'content'}, frontmatter, markdown());

	for (const page of allPages(pages)) {
		page.output = `public/${page.name}.html`;
		if (!(await changed(page, {version}))) continue;
		await writeFile(page.output, layout(page));
	}

	await writeCache({version});
}

// dev.js
import { serve } from '@sphido/dev';
import { build } from './build.js';

await serve({watch: ['content'], output: 'public', build});

The first rebuild after a save writes one page instead of all of them, and the state stays in memory between rebuilds — no re-reading the cache file per keystroke.

Numbers

1 000 markdown pages (3.9 MB), rendered through @sphido/markdown and written to disk. macOS on Apple silicon, Node.js 26, median of three runs:

A no-op rebuild is 7× faster with mtime, and the gap widens with page count — the cached path is one stat per page while the uncached one parses and writes every file.

TypeScript

import type { CacheOptions, CacheStrategy } from '@sphido/cache';

Source code

@sphido/cache