Actions: Artifact-based Deployments

[github-product-roadmap]

Summary

GitHub Actions currently supports Artifacts that enable sharing data between jobs in a workflow and store data once that workflow has completed. We are now enhancing artifacts to support decoupling build and deployment workflows and to trigger on-demand deployments from those artifacts.

Intended Outcome

Previously, we supported only the downloading of artifacts that were uploaded in the same workflow run using the download-artifact action.

These new improvements around Artifacts will now enable teams who want to decouple their CI & CD workflows: build many times but deploy only a specific built artifact version. They could refer-to/download the artifacts that were created as part of a previous run of the same workflow or a different workflow run to trigger a new deployment workflow run.

How will it work?

Developers and DevOps managers can now use the new artifact triggers to orchestrate their on-demand deployments and releases by chaining their build & deployment workflows for specific artifact sources and versions. They can also use the new "artifact views" to:

• View the full history of artifacts generated in a repository or
• Apply filters across workflows to trace each artifact version back to the specific build run that produced it or
• Understand which of the artifact versions is actually deployed to a specific deployment environment.