This composite action, based on actions/upload-artifact and packaging the artifact's content in a tarball, will preserve file attributes like file permissions. This essential capability is not implemented by GitHub until now (requested on 05.12.2019) and still delayed and/or refused? to be implemented in the future. According to GitHub, the internal API doesn't allow the implementation of such a feature, but this actions is demonstrating a working solution.

See pyTooling/download-artifact for the matching download action.

• Support all parameters of actions/upload-artifact.
  (Others support only a subset.)
• Supports Ubuntu, Windows and macOS GitHub Runner images.
  (Others are created for Linux only.)
• Well-defined behavior of tarball internal directory/file structure.
  (No silent and "unpredictable" removal of common prefixes.)
• Store files in tarball without owner and group information.
• Testcases implemented as a pipeline verifying uploads/downloads using a tarball.

jobs:
  MyJob:
    steps:
      - name: 📤 Upload artifact 'binaries'
        uses: pyTooling/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: binaries
          working-directory: build
          path: |
            bin
            lib
            
      - name: 📤 Upload artifact 'logfiles'
        uses: pyTooling/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: logfiles
          path: |
            *.report
            build/*.log

1. Do preserve file permissions
   The artifact's content is collected in a tarball, which allows preserving file attributes like file permissions.
2. Don't remove common prefix from files
   actions/upload-artifact removes the common prefix from all files before storing in an artifact. This is not a well-defined behavior. Slightly changing the list of collected files might drastically change the directory structure of the artifact.
   This action defines a root directory from where the content of the tarball is constructed. This is independent of the list of provided file patterns.

This action uses tar as provided by the GitHub runner's operating system images.

To ensure files starting with a dash aren't considered command line options to tar, tar is called with --verbatim-files-from option.

To ensure files are extracted and assigned to the owner/group of the extracting user, options --owner=root:0 and --group=root:0 are used when creating the tarball.

⚠ BSD tar doesn't support a --verbatim-files-from option. Thus, files starting with a dash might be interpreted by tar as a command line option.

-T filename, --files-from filename
In x or t mode, tar will read the list of names to be extracted from filename. In c mode, tar will read names to be archived from filename. The special name -C on a line by itself will cause the current directory to be changed to the directory specified on the following line. Names are terminated by newlines unless --null is specified. Note that --null also disables the special handling of lines containing -C.
Note: If you are generating lists of files using find(1), you probably want to use -n as well.

Source: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?tar(1)

To ensure files are extracted and assigned to the owner/group of the extracting user, options --gname=root, --gid=0, --uname=root and --uid=0 are used when creating the tarball.

To ensure files starting with a dash aren't considered command line options to tar, tar is called with --verbatim-files-from option.

To ensure files are extracted and assigned to the owner/group of the extracting user, options --owner=root:0 and --group=root:0 are used when creating the tarball.

• actions/upload-artifact@v4

• eviden-actions/upload-artifact
• nmerget/upload-gzip-artifact
• alehechka/upload-tartifact

• Patrick Lehmann (Maintainer)
• Sven Köhler
• and more...

This action was inspired by and is based on:

• actions/upload-artifact#38 - upload-artifact does not retain artifact permissions (08. Sep. 2024)
• Gist: rcdailey/download-tar-action.yml

This GitHub Composite Action (source code) licensed under The MIT License.

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT