Option to not do post-job cleanup

[Piedone]

The action does some cleanup in post-job (starting with the message "Post job cleanup."). I guess this is useful if the runner is reused, but I don't see the point of doing any cleanup on an ephemeral runner, that will be thrown away anyway. This is an issue because this cleanup can actually take significant time, like a minute, as you can also see in this run. This adds to the wait time of developers looking for build results, and to the bill paid for non-free runs.

So, it would be great to be able to turn this feature off.

I'm aware that the clean parameter exists, but that's for cleaning in the beginning, before fetching.

[wlgrd]

I agree. I also have a use case where I need to debug the runner after execution and need the checked-out code to persist.

[peter-miroshnikov]

Same here, i execute other cleanups before that and it will be weird to exclude only the files checked out in order to delete them later with this action.

[AdamJudge]

We're having the post-job cleanup cause occasional errors, so yes if it's possible to disable this it would be great

[line-joonsoo]

I think this is essential, because I having an issue with post-job cleanup...
Here is setup:
Runner.yml

    steps:
      - name: Checkout action scheduler
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Schedule automerge
        uses: ./.github/runner/auto_merge_runner  # The action.yml file is contained in this path of github actions running repo

actions.yml

  steps:
    - name: Checkout Working Repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
      with:
        repository: 'some/repository'
        ref: feature/github_action
        token: ${{ inputs.gh_token }}
     ...
     Working steps
     ...

And then, it works well on each process steps, but fails on "Post Schedule automerge" steps:

Error: Can't find 'action.yml', 'action.yaml' or 'Dockerfile' under '/xxx/xxx/_work/xxx/xxx/.github/runner/auto_merge_runner

Because, it's already checked out to "some/repository", the actions.yml file can't be found which is on original github actions running repo.
So I think it needs to reverse-checkout before doing post action, or just give options to disable post action

[snps-midhunn]

I believe this will be an important feature to have for re-using workspace across jobs. If the build artifacts are of significant size and a regression has to be run on it we can use the same workspace.

[snps-swamyt]

We also would like to have this feature, as our build artifacts are too large to be cached, and we want to use the build artifacts in the subsequent jobs.

[Kristiansmp]

We would like to have this feature also. We use kota65535/github-openvpn-connect-action to create VPN connection.
When the Post Connect to VPN is triggered, it causes the network to change (NETWORK CHANGED). Only way to control this is to Connect to VPN in earlier phase, that is "needed" --> to trigger the Post later

[langsmith]

Wild that this still hasn't been addressed 😕 Has anyone found a workaround?

[OleksandrKvl]

Without this functionality, it's impossible to use custom actions because of the failing "post" step.

UPDATE.
If you have an error like Error: Can't find 'action.yml', 'action.yaml' or 'Dockerfile' during Post action step, just avoid overwriting/removing .github directory (or wherever you store your custom action) by your action. In my case that was caused by anactions/checkout action used inside my custom action. The solution is to use path option to avoid cloning the repo directly into the root directory.

[bsumer-wyn]

We are having the same issue here. Not sure if there is a solution for this.

[BrendenWalker]

Another 'me too'. I'm migrating a very mess workflow that takes 3.5 hours to run. This would make incremental testing directly on self-hosted runner feasible vs. throwing changes at the wall and waiting.

[shadowprompt]

me too. I need remain some files for next step to use

[SriniRDev]

Is this feature available now? My workflow is failing and I need to debug the workspace for the files.

[BrendenWalker]

Is this feature available now? My workflow is failing and I need to debug the workspace for the files.

Not as far as I know. At this point I'd suggest copying the entire workspace to another location as a final step in the job when not a successful run.

You could also change the checkout so that it's in a subfolder of the project workspace. Then you can copy items of interest to a folder in the workspace which the checkout command will not cleanup.