I'm hoping to get my pip install instructions inside my docker builds as fast as possible.

I've read many posts explaining how adding your requirements.txt before the rest of the app helps you take advantage of Docker's own image cache if your requirements.txt hasn't changed. But this is no help at all when dependencies do change, even slightly.

The next step would be if we could use a consistent pip cache directory. By default, pip will cache downloaded packages in ~/.cache/pip (on Linux), and so if you're ever installing the same version of a module that has been installed before anywhere on the system, it shouldn't need to go and download it again, but instead simply use the cached version. If we could leverage a shared cache directory for docker builds, this could help speed up dependency installs a lot.

However, there doesn't appear to be any simple way to mount a volume while running docker build. The build environment seems to be basically impenetrable. I found one article suggesting a genius but complex method of running an rsync server on the host and then, with a hack inside the build to get the host IP, rsyncing the pip cache in from the host. But I'm not relishing the idea of running an rsync server in Jenkins (which isn't the most secure platform at the best of times).

Does anyone know if there's any other way to achieve a shared cache volume more simply?