Using git sparse-checkout for faster documentation builds
Leveraging git sparse-checkout in GitHub Actions enabled us to speed up
documentation builds in our repository, cutting checkout times from 20 to 30
seconds to just 2 seconds.
Developing an efficient approach to build documentation in CI workflows is
essential, especially when working in large repositories with thousands of
commits, like ours. Of course, we want to build documentation quickly and
efficiently, ensuring fast and productive workflows. When using both the
wonderful git-committers and git-revision-date-localized plugins to display document contributors and
dates at the bottom of each page, we are required to set fetch-depth: 0,
which resulted in checkout times of 20 to 30 seconds on our repository. By
leveraging git sparse-checkout within GitHub Actions,
check out time was brought down to 2 seconds.