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DevOps / GitHub Actions Interview Questions

How do you share build artifacts between jobs using actions/upload-artifact and actions/download-artifact?

Because each job in a workflow runs on a separate, isolated runner, files created in one job are not visible to another job by default. actions/upload-artifact and actions/download-artifact bridge this gap by storing files in GitHub's artifact storage during the workflow run.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Build JAR
        run: ./gradlew bootJar

      - name: Upload JAR artifact
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: app-jar                        # artifact name
          path: build/libs/*.jar               # what to upload
          retention-days: 3                    # auto-delete after 3 days

  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    steps:
      - name: Download JAR artifact
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: app-jar
          path: dist/                          # where to restore files

      - name: Deploy
        run: scp dist/*.jar user@server:/opt/app/

The name: field acts as the identifier that links upload to download. The downloading job must declare needs: build to ensure the artifact exists before it tries to fetch it.

Artifact vs cache: Artifacts are for passing build outputs (JARs, test reports, binaries) between jobs or making them available for download from the GitHub UI. Cache is for reusing dependency directories to speed up installs across workflow runs. Do not use one as a substitute for the other — they have different retention policies and semantics.

Artifacts uploaded with v4 default to a 90-day retention period unless overridden with retention-days:. Large artifacts (test videos, coverage HTML) should use short retention to avoid storage costs.

Which key in actions/upload-artifact identifies the artifact so it can be retrieved by actions/download-artifact?
What is the main difference between GitHub Actions artifacts and cache?

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