An option to use local tar.gz of node or from custom domain

[turkus]

Description:
Thanks a lot for your great work. About the problem:
I had couple of times situation where public dist wasn't available and setup-node action had timeouts.

Justification:
In case of hotfixes we don't have much time, so my concern was to use local path as a path to the dist (tar.gz) or external URL (placed on my server) to download it.
Is there an any option to achieve smth like that even now?
I tried placing some dists under tool cache dirs, but doesn't work.

Thanks in advance,
turkus

[dusan-trickovic]

Hello, @turkus! Thank you for creating this issue, I will do some investigation and get back to you with the response :)

[dusan-trickovic]

Hello again, @turkus! I just wanted to check with you if you've tried using self-hosted runners as well? You can find more about them in our docs, but basically they offer more control of hardware, operating system, and software tools than GitHub-hosted runners. This leaves a lot of room for customization in terms of architecture, OS, hardware and so on.

You could try installing your desired version of Node locally and setting up the runner as described in the docs and on the initial steps of creation. Provide the version you need to the workflow later and the runner on your machine should run.

Feel free to let us know if you have any follow-up questions or, alternatively, if our suggestion was what you were looking for.

Thank you very much for your time and cooperation :)

[turkus]

Thank you @dusan-trickovic for your response. Well it isn't about self-hosted runners. It's more like add an option in this setup-node library to give an option to use node dist from other source than node public dists, cause as you can see in other issues here in setup-node issues, that public node server gets timeouts and it occurs now often.
I suppose allowing to declare an option to provide local path to the node tar.gz would be fairly enough and not only for me - according to other similar issues.
Or URL to fetch.

[dusan-trickovic]

Hello again, @turkus ! I apologize for the late response. I understand what you mean now, I will discuss that option with the team and see what we can do about it :)

Thank you very much for your suggestion and cooperation!

[jakule]

@dusan-trickovic Any updates on this? We're also affected by this issue. The node CDN is not very reliable recently.

[bertobert]

@jakule I tried the option with the tools cache and it worked for me - you will need to set the exact version in the setup-node step so it can be found. As a matter of fact I am using self-hosted runners but this should work the same on others.

[gowridurgad]

Hi @turkus, Thank you for raising this feature request! We wanted to let you know that PR #1240 has introduced a mirror feature that addressed your request.
With this new functionality, you can now specify a custom mirror URL using the mirror input, and optionally authenticate with it using the mirror-token input. This allows you to download Node.js binaries from an alternative domain or private server, which can be helpful if public distribution servers are unavailable or if you need to use custom Node.js builds.
While this PR does not directly add support for using a local .tar.gz file, the mirror feature enables a similar outcome by hosting your custom binaries on your own server and configuring the action to use that mirror.
Please let us know if this addresses your needs or if you'd like to see additional enhancements for local file support.
Thanks again for your valuable feedback!

[turkus]

HI @gowridurgad , big thanks for you and everyone involved! 🎉