The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
Artifacts are files created as part of a build process that often contain metadata about that build's jobs like test results, security scans, etc. These can be used for reports that are displayed directly in GitLab or can be published to GitLab Pages or in some other way for users to review. These artifacts can provide a wealth of knowledge to development teams and the users they support.
Job Artifacts and Pipeline Artifacts are both included in the scope of Build Artifacts to empower GitLab CI users to more effectively manage testing capabilities across their software lifecycle in both the gitlab-ci.yml or as the latest output of a job.
For information about storing containers or packages or information about release evidence see the Package Stage direction page.
For specific information and features related to display of artifact data, check out the GitLab Features and for information about administration of artifacts please reference the Job Artifact documentation. You may also be looking for one of the related direction pages from the Verify Stage.
In 15.1 we are prioritizing error budget improvements and usability fixes. Specific improvements include feature flags gitlab#355833, gitlab#355833 and cleaning up the build artifact calculation statistics via gitlab&5380.
Beyond this, we will continue working on our goal of providing a great artifact experience for both operators and users of GitLab there are some opportunities we can address. These are listed in priority order in this table:
| Challenge | Related Epics & Issues | |
| - | There is no easy way to manage and analyze all artifacts in a Project. Downloading artifacts from jobs/pipelines and comparing or analyzing them is painful today given the sizes of the files and the other workarounds that are necessary. | https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/7473 |
| 1 | Build Artifact Usage is not being reported correctly. | gitlab&5380 |
| 2 | Artifacts are hard to manage | gitlab&5754 |
| 3 | Reports from child pipelines are hard to find | gitlab&4019 |
We are also working on adding instrumentation for tracking artifact usage in gitlab#339720 and gitlab#339721.
The Gitlab Sales teams are looking for more complex ways for customers to make use of Ultimate and Premium features like SAST and DAST with monorepos by letting customers namespace parts of reports to more granular analysis or combining Matrix Builds and Metrics Reports.
The most popular customer request is for the ability to support the generation of multiple artifacts per job to reduce the need for pipeline logic to make select files available to later jobs.
One of our most complicated request, is to handle the expire_at experience in self-managed customers better. Today, our implementation deletes data as expected for GitLab.com users, and shouldn't do the same for self-managed.
The Gitlab quality team has requested the ability to upload artifacts from a job when it fails due to a timeout to assist in debugging those pipeline failures.
The team is also investigating performance issues related to the build artifact feature set as part of our focus on Availability and Performance.
To meet our long term vision that enables users to more easily use and manage their Build Artifacts we will need to support better artifact access for parent child pipelines, better management of artifacts through an API to delete artifacts and an API to upload artifacts directly to GitLab without them being generated by a pipeline.