About workflow artifacts
An artifact is a file or collection of files produced during a workflow run. Artifacts allow you to persist data after a job has completed, and share that data with another job in the same workflow. For example, you can use artifacts to save your build and test output after a workflow run has ended.
GitHub provides two actions that you can use to upload and download build artifacts, upload-artifact and download-artifact on GitHub Enterprise Server.
Common artifacts include:
- Log files and core dumps
- Test results, failures, and screenshots
- Binary or compressed files
- Stress test performance output and code coverage results
Artifacts versus dependency caching
Artifacts and caching are similar because they provide the ability to store files on GitHub, but each feature offers different use cases and cannot be used interchangeably.
- Use caching when you want to reuse files that don't change often between jobs or workflow runs, such as build dependencies from a package management system.
- Use artifacts when you want to save files produced by a job to view after a workflow run has ended, such as built binaries or build logs.
For more information on dependency caching, see Dependency caching reference.
Artifacts from deleted workflow runs
When a workflow run is deleted all artifacts associated with the run are also deleted from storage. You can delete a workflow run using the GitHub Actions UI, the REST API, or using the GitHub CLI, see: Deleting a workflow run, Delete a workflow run, or gh run delete.