@actions/download-artifact

Download Actions Artifacts from your Workflow Runs. Internally powered by the @actions/artifact package.

See also upload-artifact.

• @actions/download-artifact
  • v4 - What's new
    • Improvements
    • Breaking Changes
  • Usage
    • Inputs
    • Outputs
  • Examples
    • Download Single Artifact
    • Download All Artifacts
    • Download multiple (filtered) Artifacts to the same directory
    • Download Artifacts from other Workflow Runs or Repositories
  • Limitations
    • Permission Loss

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

1. Downloads are significantly faster, upwards of 90% improvement in worst case scenarios.
2. Artifacts can be downloaded from other workflow runs and repositories when supplied with a PAT.

Breaking Changes

1. On self hosted runners, additional firewall rules may be required.
2. 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, by default a directory denoted by the artifacts name will be created for each individual artifact. This behavior can be changed with the merge-multiple input parameter.

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

To download them to the same directory:

steps:
- uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
  with:
    path: path/to/artifacts
    merge-multiple: true
- name: Display structure of downloaded files
  run: ls -R path/to/artifacts

Which will result in:

path/to/artifacts/
    ... contents of Artifact-A
    ... contents of Artifact-B

Download multiple (filtered) Artifacts to the same directory

In multiple arch/os scenarios, you may have Artifacts built in different jobs. To download all Artifacts to the same directory (or matching a glob pattern), you can use the pattern and merge-multiple inputs.

jobs:
  upload:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        runs-on: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.runs-on }}
    steps:
    - name: Create a File
      run: echo "hello from ${{ matrix.runs-on }}" > file-${{ matrix.runs-on }}.txt
    - name: Upload Artifact
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
      with:
        name: my-artifact-${{ matrix.runs-on }}
        path: file-${{ matrix.runs-on }}.txt
  download:
    needs: upload
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Download All Artifacts
      uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
      with:
        path: my-artifact
        pattern: my-artifact-*
        merge-multiple: true
    - run: ls -R my-artifact

This results in a directory like so:

my-artifact/
  file-macos-latest.txt
  file-ubuntu-latest.txt
  file-windows-latest.txt

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