GitHub Actions Artifacts

Posted on: May 04, 2020

since Jobs are in completely isolated environments from each other, you can use Artifacts to move files between Jobs.

Upload Artifacts

The actions/upload-artifact will take in some files, zip them up, and then have them exposed both to the runner in other jobs as well as to the user in the Actions web interface.

Example

name: Upload single file
on: push
jobs:
  upload_file:
    name: Upload File
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: echo "Hello World" > file.txt
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
        with:
          name: file
          path: file.txt

This echo's some text into a file and then uses actions/upload-artifact to zip up the file and have it available in the runner with a key of file.

As well, now we can download it out of Actions onto our own machine if we wish:

Download Artifacts

to pull these artifacts back in, you can use the actions/download-artifact action. you pass in a param of name to then download the zip file with that key and it will extract the files into the workspace.

Example

Taking the previous example, we can now add an additonal action and grab the file we uploaded and bring it back down and print it out.

Do note as we want to run the 2nd job after the first ends, we can use the needs field to define that download_file is dependent on upload_file.

name: Upload and download single file
on: push
jobs:
  upload_file:
    name: Upload File
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: echo "Hello World" > file.txt
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
        with:
          name: file
          path: file.txt
  download_file:
    name: Download File
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: upload_file
    steps:
      - uses: actions/download-artifact@v1
        with:
          name: file
      - run: cat file.txt