Delete artifacts uploaded by actions/upload-artifact@v4

[muzimuzhi]

https://github.blog/changelog/2023-12-14-github-actions-artifacts-v4-is-now-generally-available/

https://github.com/actions/toolkit/tree/main/packages/artifact

[muzimuzhi]

GeekyEggo/delete-artifact@v2 can only delete artifacts uploaded by actions/upload-artifact@v3, not v4.

• Unable to delete artifacts uploaded by actions/upload-artifact@v4 GeekyEggo/delete-artifact#14

[muzimuzhi]

Yes! Artifact IDs can be passed to downstream step through

• upstream step output artifact-id set by actions/upload-artifact@v4
• upstream job output <output_name>: ${{ steps.<step_id>.outputs.artifact-id }}
• (optional) downstream job (step) env <env_var>: ${{ needs.<upstream_job_id>.outputs.<output_name> }}

Job outputs are available to all downstream jobs that depend on this job.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-jobs/defining-outputs-for-jobs

[muzimuzhi]

Till now, two successful ways to delete artifact(s) uploaded by actions/upload-artifact@v4 are demonstrated.

The common part is that an artifact is deleted through

gh api --method DELETE /repos/OWNER/REPO/actions/artifacts/ARTIFACT_ID

see API doc https://docs.github.com/en/rest/actions/artifacts?apiVersion=2022-11-28#delete-an-artifact.

What's different is how artifact id is fetched:

• Job "Upload artifacts", step "Delete multiple artifacts with gh" uses gh api /repos/OWNER/REPO/actions/runs/RUN_ID/artifacts to get list of first 30 artifacts in a workflow run, then filter json response with jq to get artifact name-id bindings.
• Job "Delete artifacts", step "Delete last artifact" takes an artifact id from upstream job outputs, which comes from a step output.
  This way, the bash script is shorter, but one has to name steps and jobs.

[muzimuzhi]

Other possibilities

• direct gh support Support for viewing, managing, and accessing workflow artifacts cli/cli#6532
• gh extension gh-artifact-purge
  Currently works per owner or repository wide, thus slow when many artifacts existed but were not uploaded during current workflow run.
• other gh extensions

   gh extension search artifact
   Showing 4 of 4 extensions
  
      REPO                            DESCRIPTION
   ✓  andyfeller/gh-artifact-purge    GitHub CLI extension to list and delete GitHub Actio...
      cngJo/gh-artifacts-prune        Github CLI extension to prune action artifacts
      ConorMacBride/gh-serve          Serve GitHub Actions HTML artifacts locally 🌍
      jeremyd2019/gh-pr-run-download  stupid script to download artifacts from a run found...
  

• [not checked] other actions to delete artifacts
  https://github.com/marketplace?category=&type=actions&verification=&query=delete+artifact

[muzimuzhi]

@octokit/plugin-rest-endpoint-methods (npm package) provides "one method for each REST API endpoint".

octokit.rest.actions.listWorkflowRunArtifacts({
  owner,
  repo,
  run_id,
});

octokit.rest.actions.deleteArtifact({
  owner,
  repo,
  artifact_id,
});

• https://github.com/octokit/plugin-rest-endpoint-methods.js/blob/main/docs/actions/listWorkflowRunArtifacts.md
• https://github.com/octokit/plugin-rest-endpoint-methods.js/blob/main/docs/actions/deleteArtifact.md
• @octokit/action

[muzimuzhi]

Supported by GeekyEggo/delete-artifact@v4.

https://github.com/GeekyEggo/delete-artifact/releases/tag/v4.0.0

[muzimuzhi]

The ideal solution is that @actions/download-artifact supports a new boolean input to control whether to delete downloaded artifacts in runs.post step.

• @actions/checkout uses !!core.getState('isPost') to distinguish main and post states, so it can set main: dist/index.js along with post: dist/index.js. See its action.yml and main.ts.
• Compared to GeekyEggo/delete-artifact, actions/download-artifact is much simpler (see download-artifact.ts). It simply calls methods artifactClient.getArtifact(), artifactClient.listArtifacts(), and artifactClient.downloadArtifact() from @actions/artifact package, which wraps @octokit/core.
  Currently @actions/artifact doesn't provide artifactClient.deleteArtifact().