How to install packages globally in a bitbucket pipeline?

[Chris Spencer]

How do you install packages in pipeline so that they're accessible in all steps?

Each pipeline step is treated as a unique docker image, so all changes made in that step are lost when that step completes. In the documentation, you can specify "artifacts" to save directories and files across steps, but I see no easy way to use this to save packages.

[Philip Hodder]

Hello Chris,

Can you expand on what these packages are? What are they used for?

If they are build dependencies, you can use the caches feature to persist the packages across steps and pipelines. However, they will not be 100% available as the cache expires every week (or on manual deletion).

If you mean copying over the entire volume of the step across to the next step, this is currently not supported. I'd recommend opening a feature request with your use-case, if that's the case.

Or is this something else? Can you please share some more details here?

Thanks,

Phil