Upload-artifact: Uploading a single file

[lannonbr]

Say I wish to upload a screenshot made from puppeteer, can it be possible to upload just the image generated rather than a zip file only containing that image.

[TingluoHuang]

you can't since we use the artifact name as a folder to hold all uploaded files.

[os6sense]

@TingluoHuang I think that counts as a feature request :)

[TingluoHuang]

@os6sense agreed, the UI could have some pop-up dialog to allow you download individual file within your artifact.

[eine]

IMHO, this action could/should:

• Support providing a list of items, each being either a folder (current behaviour), a file (first comment above), a glob pattern (also requested in #11), or an exclude pattern (https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/44#issuecomment-571293418).
• NOT package the content automatically.
• The name should be optional, and only used to create 'sections' in the pop-up, not to name the artifacts.

For example:

  with:
    title: my-artifacts
      - files: [ path/to/artifact.tar.gz ]
      - name: "Packages"
        files: [ path/to/rpms/*.rpm,  path/to/debs/*.deb ]
      - name: "Docs"
        files: [ "README.md", path/to/docs, !path/to/docs/tmp ]

would create:

• my-artifacts:
  
  
  
  • artifact.tar.gz
  
  
  • Packages:
  
  
  • package_x86_64.rpm
  
  
  • package_aarch64.rpm
  
  
  • package_x86_64.deb
  
  
  • package_aarch64.deb
  
  
  • Docs
  
  
  • README.md
  
  
  • USE_GUIDE.md
  
  
  • CHANGELOG.md
  
  

Ideally, the GUI would allow to download each file separately OR a tarball of each of the sections ('Packages' and/or 'Docs', in these examples), as suggested by @TingluoHuang.

EDIT

Related to #5, each of the files or sections should also have a 'remove' button, only visible to maintainers.

Ideally, it would be possible to reorganize the content of the 'artifacts folder'. I.e., move items from a section to another.

[Stanzilla]

Yup, would love to be able to upload files instead. my build process already ends with a zip file and currently this action would just zip the zip.

[eine]

Yup, would love to be able to upload files instead. my build process already ends with a zip file and currently this action would just zip the zip.

This is worse with any non-zip package/tarball. For zips I extract them, so they are compressed again. However, for tar.gz, you get double compression.

[Stanzilla]

@damccorm any plans for that?

[eine]

@damccorm any plans for that?

/cc @madhurig

[mooreatv]

I would also love to be able to specify an already made zip or other single file instead of getting zip containing a zip

[Jeff-Tian]

Bump

[eine]

This issue and #7 sum up ~100 reactions. @chrispat, @TingluoHuang, @madhurig, might we have an update about the status of this enhancement request?

[pelotom]

Also, I _had_ a process which produced a .zip file, and when I discovered this idiosyncrasy I removed that step so that it just uploaded the directory... only to discover that the build now took 20 minutes where before it took ~1. It appears that when you _do_ upload a folder, it does the zipping on the server instead of the client, which is just... why? I'm left feeling the only reasonable way to use this action is to zip your artifact locally yourself, then upload it and live with the fact that you will have to download a zip containing a zip.

[jperl]

Ideally you could upload files uncompressed and be able to reference them by url. That way you could include screenshots within markdown of a status check / comment.

[chrisdembia]

This would be fantastic. In particular, the current zipping does not preserve symlinks or the executable bit.

[filips123]

@eine @damccorm @madhurig Is there any update about this? I really like idea in https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/3#issuecomment-524442814. Lack of this is also one of the reasons why I can't use GitHub Actios as my primary CI.

[eine]

@filips123, unfortunately, not at all. Label "work in progress" was added to #7 18 days ago, but there has been no comment/update that I am aware.

[konradpabjan]

@filips123 @eine Posted an update about v2 in https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/7#issuecomment-566114993

[DalderupMaurice]

Will the v2 also support globs or uploading of all files in a certain folder?
I'm currently using electron and I need to upload 12 files (exe's, dmgs, snaps, ymls, ...) but I have to adjust the GH action with every release (as the name changes because the version is included in the name) and I have to define an upload action for every file

[eine]

@DalderupMaurice, on the one hand, I think that the relevant new is that the action is going to be open sourced. Whether globs or uploading all files is supported should not be relevant once we can all contribute. On the other hand, although not clean, you can currently update the names programmatically, so that you don't need to change the names manually for each release. See examples about setting the output of a step and using it afterwards.

[konradpabjan]

The v2 preview is out and ready for feedback! 😀

For more information see: https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/62

With the v2-preview you can now upload artifacts by specifying

• An individual file
• A directory
• A wildcard pattern

Note: We only currently support downloading an artifact from the GitHub UI by zipping all the files together (this is independent of how the artifact gets uploaded). If you upload an individual file, in the UI the artifact will still present itself as a Zip because that is currently only what we support. We have plans in our roadmap to offer a more enhanced artifact UI experience that will allow you to browse and download individual files from an artifact. No ETA on when that might arrive, but it is something that we really really want to enhance.

Some more information about zipping and compression: https://github.com/actions/toolkit/blob/master/packages/artifact/docs/additional-information.md#is-my-artifact-compressed

[imjasonmiller]

Wonderful @konradpabjan. Thank you for the hard work, it is much appreciated!

[illera88]

Hi,
@konradpabjan. I've tried the version 2 to upload a single file but it stills zip it, Is that the intended behaviour?

Thanks

[konradpabjan]

@illera88 See my comment: https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/3#issuecomment-598820814

The zip is provided because of a UI limitation and it is independent of how an artifact gets uploaded

[illera88]

Thanks!! Looking forward for the update you mentioned

[konradpabjan]

v2 has officially been released! https://github.blog/changelog/2020-04-28-github-actions-v2-artifact-actions/

With it, you can now specify

• An individual file
• A directory
• A wildcard pattern

The README has also been updated with examples on how to upload individual files. I consider this issue fixed so i'll be closing this.

A lot of users many still be confused and think that their artifacts are uploaded as a zip (they're not). Files are uploaded individually one by one. We have some work to do on the UI side of GitHub to allow users to browse and download files individually from an artifact. Right now in order for everything to be downloaded at once, a zip gets dynamically created when you click to download the artifact. This zip is a UI limitation and it is independent of how the artifact gets upload.

UI enhancements can be tracked in this issue (we'll report when we have something to share): https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/14

I'll be pinning this issue for awareness in-case anyone stumbles upon this and is a little confused as to why they get a zip.

[eine]

Thanks @konradpabjan!

After recent updates, many of the features requested above are implemented already:

• [x] Support providing a list of items, each being either a folder (current behaviour), a file (first comment above), or a glob pattern (also requested in #11).
  
  
  
  • [ ] ? Or an exclude pattern (#44 (comment)).
  
  
• [ ] NOT package the content automatically.
• [x] The name should be optional, and only used to create 'sections' in the pop-up, not to name the artifacts.
• [ ] GUI would allow to download each file separately OR a tarball of each of the sections ('Packages' and/or 'Docs', in these examples), as suggested by @TingluoHuang. See https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact/issues/14#issuecomment-620728238.
• [x] Related to #5, each of the files or sections should also have a 'remove' button, only visible to maintainers.
• [ ] Ideally, it would be possible to reorganize the content of the 'artifacts folder'. I.e., move items from a section to another.

Supporting a list of paths/patterns as an alternative to https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact#uploading-to-the-same-artifact is already being tracked in #55.

@konradpabjan, can you please clarify the state of the item marked with ??

[konradpabjan]

@eine

Exclude characters and multiple paths should be added after the major bugs introduced with v2 get sorted out (some of the connection errors reported are pretty serious, so I don't want to add any new features yet. stability > new features). Both of those should be completed at the same time though.

In terms of GUI updates and other improvements.... I don't like to give promises or dates 😂I tend to be off pretty significantly so it's best to just wait.

[TiagoGouvea]

The issue seems to be resolved, but I'm facing some problems with it. Upload and download a file (.env) on project root.

Trying to do a cat on downloaded file I got cat: .env: Is a directory.

I wrote a public test action:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1

      - name: Create .env file
        run: |
          echo "my file content" > .env
          cat .env

      - name: Check .env file
        run: |
          cat .env

      - name: Store .env artifcat
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: .env

  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1

      - name: Get artifact
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: .env

      - name: Check .env file
        run: |
          cat .env

Downloading the artifact on GuitHub interface, the zip file contains my ".env" file like expected.

What I'm missing out?

[dentarg]

@TiagoGouvea see the log from "Get Artifact"

https://github.com/TiagoGouvea/github-actions-test/runs/732127090?check_suite_focus=true#step:3:6

Artifact artifact was downloaded to /home/runner/work/github-actions-test/github-actions-test/.env/artifact

That should explain it, but if the behaviour is the expected or unexpected from this action, I don't know :)

[TiagoGouvea]

Thank you @dentarg for you quick answer and your observation.

In fact, checking now, there are two situations (show above).

My expected behavior, on any case, would be the file get back to the same path. On both cases it downloaded to a folder.

With name: envFile

• it downloaded the file to .env/.env
• Public action

Without name

• it downloaded the file to .env/artifact/.env
• Public action

[bradennapier]

https://github.com/bradennapier/eslint-plus-action/blob/master/src/artifacts.ts

I just got done doing a bunch of effort to get artifacts handling working really nicely using the api directly instead of the toolkits so all the features can be enabled. Figure y'all might find it useful since a lot of that took forever :-P

I still need to do a pass at polishing but it all works well.

[zakiya27]

When I am uploading my folder it is getting uploaded in zip format . So, can someone tell me why that is happening as I am not uploading it in a zip format but still it is getting uploaded in a zip mode.

[MCOfficer]

Artifacts are always downloaded as zip. If you were to upload a zip, iirc anyone downloading it would get a zip containing a zip.

The download-artifact actions gets around that btw.

[Wohlstand]

Recently I tried to upload the DMG (it's a compressed package by itself), but I got it packed into ZIP 🤔
Seems this case isn't completed...

How I got it:

    - name: Upload Package
      if: runner.os == 'macOS' 
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
      with:
        path: build/package/archive-filename.dmg
        name: ${{ matrix.config.name }} ${{ matrix.config.build_type }}

[MCOfficer]

A lot of users many still be confused and think that their artifacts are uploaded as a zip (they're not). Files are uploaded individually one by one. We have some work to do on the UI side of GitHub to allow users to browse and download files individually from an artifact. Right now in order for everything to be downloaded at once, a zip gets dynamically created when you click to download the artifact. This zip is a UI limitation and it is independent of how the artifact gets upload.

[Wohlstand]

@MCOfficer, Oh, ok, understood, thanks for the explanation!