In GitHub Actions, how can I uniquely identify the workflow under execution?

Question

I am using GitHub Enterprise, with a self-hosted runner. I'm storing build artifacts in dedicated folders so that I can have multiple releases in the same pipeline, without worrying about overwriting old artifacts with new releases.

I'm storing my artifacts using this folder scheme:

ARTIFACTS_PATH: "c:/github/artifacts/${{ github.repository_owner }}/${{ github.event.repository.name }}/${{ github.run_id }}"

This helps me ensure each workflow run gets its own directory. But my issue now is I want to implement a "rolling delete", where after each workflow completes it deletes all but the last 5 artifact folders related to that workflow. But for that I need to be able to map the artifact folders to specific workflows.

So what I'd like to have is something that looks like this, but the workflow_id environment variable doesn't exist.

ARTIFACTS_PATH: "c:/github/artifacts/${{ github.repository_owner }}/${{ github.event.repository.name }}/${{ github.workflow_id }}/${{ github.run_number }}"

Is there any way I can unique identify the workflow being executed through a unique id or something similar?

Answer 1

You can either use the workflow file name (unique, as the workflow files have to be stored directly in the folder .github/workflows) or the workflow id.

The workflow id can be determined by

• getting the workflow id from a run id via the GitHub Actions REST API. The run id is available via the expression ${{github.run_id}}.
  source: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/actions#get-a-workflow-run

• getting the workflow id by specifying the workflow file name as parameter via the GitHub Actions REST API.
  Source: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/actions#get-a-workflow