14-Artifacts.md

Artifacts

GitHub offers built-in artifact functionality for saving and reusing artifacts across jobs. These artifacts can simply be described as some kind of output from a build process. This could be a binary, supporting files, or pretty much anything you want to pass from one job to the next.

The exercise below will walk you through updating the previously created Continuous Integration workflow (see 13-Continuous-Integration) with the artifact action that will handle saving the artifact created from our Golang build process. We will later use this to continuously deliver a Docker image with our artifact (see 16-Packages).

Prerequisite Exercises

• 13-Continuous-Integration

Step 1: Add the artifact save action

By adding the public action actions/upload-artifact to our Continuous Integration workflow, we have an easy-to-use way of working with the Artifacts API.

1. From the default branch of your repository, create a new branch of code called feature/artifacts
2. Open the file named .github/workflows/ci-cd.yaml
3. Replace the contents of the file with:

name: Continuous Integration & Delivery
on:
  pull_request:
  workflow_dispatch:
defaults:
  run:
    shell: bash
jobs:
  ci:
    name: Continuous Integration
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    defaults:
      run:
        working-directory: golang_app
    steps:
      - name: Clone
        uses: actions/[email protected]
      - name: Get Dependencies
        run: go get app
      - name: Build
        run: go build
      - name: Run Linting
        uses: golangci/golangci-lint-action@v3
        with:
          working-directory: golang_app
      - name: Run Tests
        run: go test
      - name: Store Artifact
        uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          name: golang_app
          path: golang_app/app

4. Add & commit your changes, then publish your branch.
5. Go to your repository, and view the Pull Requests tab.
6. Create a pull request to merge feature/artifacts into your default branch.
7. Click the Show All Checks link on the status checks in your pull request, then click the Details link next to Continuous Integration.

8. Click the Summary link on the left-hand navigation.

The result will be an artifact that authenticated users can download. Additionally, this artifact can be used in deployment or other automation using the actions/artifact-download action.

It should be noted that artifact retention is only as long configured for your enterprise or organization.

Step 2: Merge the changes to your default branch and update your local repository

1. Click the green Merge pull request button on the pull request from step 1.6. This will put your code into the main branch.
2. Delete the published branch created in Step 1
3. Checkout to your default branch locally and pull down the changes.