Question

A teammate asks you to retrieve the 'coverage-report' artifact from a workflow run that completed 95 days ago. You open the run's summary page in the GitHub UI, but the Artifacts section is empty even though the run's logs clearly show an 'Upload artifact' step that succeeded. The repository uses the default artifact retention settings. What is the most likely reason the artifact is unavailable, and what should you do?

Accepted Answer

The artifact was automatically deleted because it exceeded the default 90-day retention period; you must re-run the workflow to regenerate it.

Answer

Artifacts only appear on the summary page for in-progress runs; use the REST API 'List workflow run artifacts' endpoint to download it from the completed run.

Answer

The artifact is hidden because the run is older than 30 days; increase the repository retention setting to 400 days and the artifact will reappear.

Answer

The upload step logged success but the artifact was never stored because logs and artifacts share the same retention window of 7 days.