Allow personal accounts to set a default GitHub Actions retention period across repositories

[ThePieMonster]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Discussion Details

Request

Please add a personal account setting for the default GitHub Actions retention period, including a one-day option, covering both existing and future personally owned repositories.

Problem and use case

Personal account owners may want short-lived CI artifacts to expire after one day across their repositories. Configuring this currently requires updating each repository separately or maintaining retention settings in individual artifact-upload steps.

Long retention periods can allow temporary artifacts to accumulate and exhaust storage quotas. Changing repository retention also leaves existing artifact expiration dates unchanged, requiring separate cleanup.

The repository API makes the initial configuration scriptable, but future repositories still require another update or ongoing automation. A personal account default would avoid this repeated maintenance.

Proposed behavior

• Add a retention default under personal account settings, with the same supported duration choices as repository settings.
• Let newly created repositories inherit that default automatically.
• Offer an explicit option to apply the value to selected or all existing personally owned repositories.
• Show whether a repository inherits the account default or has an explicit override, with clear precedence rules.
• Provide an API to read and update the account default.

The UI should explain that the shared setting also affects logs, workflow runs, checks, and commit statuses, and that changing it applies prospectively to new data.

Benefit

This would give individual developers a central way to control retention and storage usage without moving their repositories into an organization. Organizations already have a central retention setting; personal accounts would benefit from a comparable default.

References

• Repository retention settings
• Organization retention settings
• Related: Actions storage quota remains at 100% after deleting artifacts
• Related: How to properly manage artifact storage?

[github-actions[bot]]

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