Artifact Download Action with File Permission Preservation

This composite action, based on actions/download-artifact and extracting the artifact's content from a tarball, will preserve file attributes like file permissions. This essential capability is not implemented by GitHub until now (requested on 05.12.2019) and still delayed and/or refused? to be implemented in the future. According to GitHub, the internal API doesn't allow the implementation of such a feature, but this actions is demonstrating a working solution.

📤 See pyTooling/upload-artifact for the matching upload action.

Usage

jobs:
  MyJob:
    steps:
      - name: 📥 Download artifact
        uses: pyTooling/download-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: binary

      - name: 📥 Download artifact
        uses: pyTooling/download-artifact@dev
        with:
          name: documentation
          path: public

      - name: 📥 Download artifact
        uses: pyTooling/download-artifact@dev
        with:
          pattern: unittest-*
          path: reports

Input Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
name	no	''	Name of the artifact to download. If unspecified, all artifacts for the run are downloaded.
path	no	$GITHUB_WORKSPACE	Destination path. Supports basic tilde expansion.
pattern	no		A glob pattern to the artifacts that should be downloaded. Ignored if name is specified.
merge-multiple	no	false	When multiple artifacts are matched, this changes the behavior of the destination directories. If true, the downloaded artifacts will be in the same directory specified by path. If false, the downloaded artifacts will be extracted into individual named directories within the specified path.
github-token	no		The GitHub token used to authenticate with the GitHub API. This is required when downloading artifacts from a different repository or from a different workflow run. If unspecified, the action will download artifacts from the current repo and the current workflow run.
repository	no	${{ github.repository }}	The repository owner and the repository name joined together by "/". If github-token is specified, this is the repository that artifacts will be downloaded from.
run-id	no	${{ github.run_id }}	The id of the workflow run where the desired download artifact was uploaded from. If github-token is specified, this is the run that artifacts will be downloaded from.
tarball-name	no	1
investigate	no	false	If enabled, show the downloaded artifact's directory content as a tree.

Output Parameters

Parameter	Description
download-path	Absolute path where the artifact(s) were downloaded.

Fixed behavior compared to actions/download-artifact

1. Preserve file permissions
   The artifact's content is collected in a tarball, which allows preserving file attributes like file permissions.
2. Don't remove common prefix from files
   actions/upload-artifact removes the common prefix from all files before storing in an artifact. This is not a well-defined behavior. Slightly changing the list of collected files might drastically change the directory structure of the artifact.
   This action defines a root directory from where the content of the tarball is constructed. This is independent of the list of provided file patterns.

Further Features

• Accepts artifacts uploaded from actions/upload-artifact (legacy artifacts) and pyTooling/upload-artifacts.

Dependencies

• actions/download-artifact@v4

Competing Actions

• eviden-actions/download-artifact
• nmerget/download-gzip-artifact
• alehechka/download-tartifact

Contributors

• Patrick Lehmann (Maintainer)
• Sven Köhler
• and more...

Credits

This action was inspired by and is based on:

• actions/upload-artifact#38 - upload-artifact does not retain artifact permissions (08. Sep. 2024)
• Gist: rcdailey/download-tar-action.yml

License

This GitHub Composite Action (source code) licensed under The MIT License.

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SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

Footnotes

1. '__pyTooling_upload_artifact__.tar' ↩