Is there a way (or will there be a way) to tell Octopus to acquire packages and copy them to the tentacles on all the target machines but not actually do the deploy. Then when the deploy is started, it would do exactly what it does now but would find the packages in the cache thus potentially greatly reducing deploy times (or for our situation it would definitely reduce deploy times).
This was mentioned here many years ago and option 1 is what I’m looking for as well:
Hoping for some good news that it’s already in the works!
Octopus doesn’t have the ability to pre-deploy packages to end targets in advance of a deployment.
Having said that we do have a couple of options that may work for you. The simplest would be adding a Manual Intervention step into your project as the first step. What this allows is for you to start the deployment ahead of schedule, it would then download the packages and pause at this step until you were ready to release the rest of the deployment.
The second option would be to have a nuget feed located close to your production targets, then setting a variable on your project Octopus.Action.Package.DownloadOnTentacle = TRUE, which directs the Tentacle to download the package directly. You would need to have DNS setup to redirect the feed to the closest local feed, so complexity is higher for this configuration, however would speed up your deployments.
I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions!
