How to publish artifacts in GitHub Actions?

Short answer

Use actions/upload-artifact to save files from a workflow and actions/download-artifact to retrieve them in downstream jobs.

Steps

1. Build or generate files in a job.
2. Use actions/upload-artifact to store them.
3. Use actions/download-artifact in another job.

Example

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run build
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: build-output
          path: dist/

  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: build-output
      - run: ./deploy.sh

Tips

• Artifact names must be unique within a workflow run.
• Use retention-days to control storage costs.
• Large artifacts slow down upload and download times.

Common issues

• Artifact names are case-sensitive.
• Downloading an artifact that was not uploaded causes failure.
• Artifact storage has size and retention limits.