question on where to store goldens

[andrewescutia]

Hi, would like to know if there have been any git performance implications on storing golden images within the repository? Is there a way to store goldens within git LFS? or a CDN for comparison? Is that even necessary? Slightly concerned in potentially storing a large amount of goldens (along with revisions) in git. Not sure though if this should truly be a concern.

Thanks.

[mZadorskii]

We have a lot of goldens and never had any issues with storage / git.

[coreysprague]

@andrewescutia
I'm going to give my take... (I'm on the same team as @mZadorskii, but I've insulated the pain from him 😆 ). I wish we had done LFS. It's fine when pulling latest changes, but when doing a fresh clone, it is pretty expensive and the repository size is large. It doesn't impact us day to day, but we had to put some workarounds in CI so that it wouldn't do a fresh clone with every build because of the golden sizes.

That being said, for our workflow though, having the goldens in the repo has been invaluable -- they are a key part of PR review... it helps understand the scope of user facing changes and catch potential issues.

[andrewescutia]

Thats a good point. Our CI also currently does a fresh clone on build. Can I ask what kind of workarounds you had to put in place to make that more efficient?

[coreysprague]

Our CI agents spin up with a mounted working folder already checked out

[vHanda]

I've been using Golden Tests and just adding the images to git. Overtime the size of the git repo is obviously increasing, eventually I plan to just rewrite the git history and remove golden tests older than 'x' months. This strategy only works well in a private company where changing the git hash of all the commits is acceptable.

I wouldn't do that in a public repo.