@actions/download-artifact
Download Actions Artifacts from your Workflow Runs. Internally powered by the @actions/artifact package.
See also upload-artifact.
v4 - What's new
Important
download-artifact@v4+ is not currently supported on GHES yet. If you are on GHES, you must use v3.
The release of upload-artifact@v4 and download-artifact@v4 are major changes to the backend architecture of Artifacts. They have numerous performance and behavioral improvements.
For more information, see the @actions/artifact
documentation.
Improvements
- Downloads are significantly faster, upwards of 90% improvement in worst case scenarios.
- Artifacts can be downloaded from other workflow runs and repositories when supplied with a PAT.
Breaking Changes
- On self hosted runners, additional firewall rules may be required.
- Downloading artifacts that were created from
action/upload-artifact@v3
and below are not supported.
Usage
Inputs
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
with:
# Name of the artifact to download.
# If unspecified, all artifacts for the run are downloaded.
# Optional.
name:
# Destination path. Supports basic tilde expansion.
# Optional. Default is $GITHUB_WORKSPACE
path:
# A glob pattern to the artifacts that should be downloaded.
# Ignored if name is specified.
# Optional.
pattern:
# When multiple artifacts are matched, this changes the behavior of the destination directories.
# If true, the downloaded artifacts will be in the same directory specified by path.
# If false, the downloaded artifacts will be extracted into individual named directories within the specified path.
# Optional. Default is 'false'
merge-multiple:
# The GitHub token used to authenticate with the GitHub API.
# This is required when downloading artifacts from a different repository or from a different workflow run.
# Optional. If unspecified, the action will download artifacts from the current repo and the current workflow run.
github-token:
# The repository owner and the repository name joined together by "/".
# If github-token is specified, this is the repository that artifacts will be downloaded from.
# Optional. Default is ${{ github.repository }}
repository:
# The id of the workflow run where the desired download artifact was uploaded from.
# If github-token is specified, this is the run that artifacts will be downloaded from.
# Optional. Default is ${{ github.run_id }}
run-id:
Outputs
Name | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
download-path |
Absolute path where the artifact(s) were downloaded | /tmp/my/download/path |
Examples
Download Single Artifact
Download to current working directory ($GITHUB_WORKSPACE
):
steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
with:
name: my-artifact
- name: Display structure of downloaded files
run: ls -R
Download to a specific directory (also supports ~
expansion):
steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
with:
name: my-artifact
path: your/destination/dir
- name: Display structure of downloaded files
run: ls -R your/destination/dir
Download All Artifacts
If the name
input parameter is not provided, all artifacts will be downloaded. To differentiate between downloaded artifacts, a directory denoted by the artifacts name will be created for each individual artifact.
Example, if there are two artifacts Artifact-A
and Artifact-B
, and the directory is etc/usr/artifacts/
, the directory structure will look like this:
etc/usr/artifacts/
Artifact-A/
... contents of Artifact-A
Artifact-B/
... contents of Artifact-B
Download all artifacts to the current working directory:
steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
- name: Display structure of downloaded files
run: ls -R
Download all artifacts to a specific directory:
steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
with:
path: path/to/artifacts
- name: Display structure of downloaded files
run: ls -R path/to/artifacts
Download Artifacts from other Workflow Runs or Repositories
It may be useful to download Artifacts from other workflow runs, or even other repositories. By default, the permissions are scoped so they can only download Artifacts within the current workflow run. To elevate permissions for this scenario, you can specify a github-token
along with other repository and run identifiers:
steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
with:
name: my-other-artifact
github-token: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }} # token with actions:read permissions on target repo
repository: actions/toolkit
run-id: 1234
Limitations
Permission Loss
File permissions are not maintained during artifact upload. All directories will have 755
and all files will have 644
. For example, if you make a file executable using chmod
and then upload that file, post-download the file is no longer guaranteed to be set as an executable.
If you must preserve permissions, you can tar
all of your files together before artifact upload. Post download, the tar
file will maintain file permissions and case sensitivity.
- name: 'Tar files'
run: tar -cvf my_files.tar /path/to/my/directory
- name: 'Upload Artifact'
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
with:
name: my-artifact
path: my_files.tar