How-to guides

Who this is for: anyone with a running NativeLink who now needs it to do one specific thing differently. What you'll have at the end: the one page that does your task, rather than a tour. Time: as long as the task takes.

How this section works

Every page here is a task, phrased as the thing you are trying to do. None of them is a tour of a subsystem (that's what Concepts is for), and none of them is an exhaustive field list, which is what Reference is for. A recipe gives you the complete working artifact first, then explains only the parts of it you have to decide about, then tells you how to tell it worked.

Pages assume you have read Configuration: you have a config file and you know which part of it you're editing. If you don't yet, that section is worth the detour.

Pick your task

I need my cache stored somewhere else. Storage backends compares every place NativeLink can put bytes (filesystem, S3 and compatibles, GCS, Azure Blob, OCI, Redis and Mongo) on durability, latency and cost. Compose stores is how you layer a fast tier over a durable one.

I need to shrink what I store or send. See Remote cache compression and Content-defined chunking.

I need more than one worker. Run multiple workers is the multi-worker topology: how workers share the CAS, how the scheduler picks one, and which parts of the shipped example will mislead you.

I need this to be secure on the network. TLS and authentication covers TLS on the public listeners, mutual TLS as the access control, keeping the worker API off the public interface, and what NativeLink does not authenticate.

I need to move to a newer version. Upgrade to a newer version is the upgrade path: what actually breaks between releases, the order to move the processes in, and what happens to the cache you already have.

I'm coming from another REAPI cache. Migrate from another REAPI cache puts NativeLink in front of your old one as a read-only diode, so you never copy the data and never lose the hit rate.

SidewaysConfiguration

If none of these is your task and you're here to learn the config file itself, Configuration is the page you want.

NextOperate

Recipes get the shape right. The Operate section is what you read once the thing is real and other people depend on it.