---
title: Keep your cache close — it’s faster!
authors: Stanisław Chmiela
published: December 7, 2023
---

## How to speed up CocoaPods

The CocoaPods cache server is good, but what if we could serve Pods from the local filesystem rather than the network?

In the first half of November we added “warm” CocoaPods cache to every Mac VM image. It includes popular remote Pods that your app may need.

The cache is created by building several different reference Expo apps on a single worker and uploading the resulting `~/Library/Caches/CocoaPods` to the cloud. When building VM templates we include that directory in the resulting image, so your builds run faster and don't rely on the network.

## Results

In total the cache comes close to 5 GB and saves, on average, a minute from your iOS build time. For a blank new app this means “Install Pods” took 1:37 before and now it takes a whopping 12 seconds.

![Cache comparison](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/9r24npb8/production/2241cdf0326c8d8ff59f6022406a32c1ed53c4e6-1200x513.png)

Another way you could speed up your builds is custom caching. By configuring [`cache`](https://docs.expo.dev/eas/json/#cache) [property in](https://docs.expo.dev/eas/json/#cache) [**eas.json**](https://docs.expo.dev/eas/json/#cache), you can tell EAS which directories you would like to be automatically saved and restored. Read more at [“Custom Caching”](https://docs.expo.dev/build-reference/caching/#custom-caching).