Artifacts¶

Note: You will need to configure an artifact repository to run this example. Configuring an artifact repository here.

When running workflows, it is very common to have steps that generate or consume artifacts. Often, the output artifacts of one step may be used as input artifacts to a subsequent step.

The below workflow spec consists of two steps that run in sequence. The first step named generate-artifact will generate an artifact using the whalesay template that will be consumed by the second step named print-message that then consumes the generated artifact.

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Workflow
metadata:
  generateName: artifact-passing-
spec:
  entrypoint: artifact-example
  templates:
  - name: artifact-example
    steps:
    - - name: generate-artifact
        template: whalesay
    - - name: consume-artifact
        template: print-message
        arguments:
          artifacts:
          # bind message to the hello-art artifact
          # generated by the generate-artifact step
          - name: message
            from: "{{steps.generate-artifact.outputs.artifacts.hello-art}}"

  - name: whalesay
    container:
      image: docker/whalesay:latest
      command: [sh, -c]
      args: ["cowsay hello world | tee /tmp/hello_world.txt"]
    outputs:
      artifacts:
      # generate hello-art artifact from /tmp/hello_world.txt
      # artifacts can be directories as well as files
      - name: hello-art
        path: /tmp/hello_world.txt

  - name: print-message
    inputs:
      artifacts:
      # unpack the message input artifact
      # and put it at /tmp/message
      - name: message
        path: /tmp/message
    container:
      image: alpine:latest
      command: [sh, -c]
      args: ["cat /tmp/message"]

The whalesay template uses the cowsay command to generate a file named /tmp/hello-world.txt. It then outputs this file as an artifact named hello-art. In general, the artifact's path may be a directory rather than just a file. The print-message template takes an input artifact named message, unpacks it at the path named /tmp/message and then prints the contents of /tmp/message using the cat command. The artifact-example template passes the hello-art artifact generated as an output of the generate-artifact step as the message input artifact to the print-message step. DAG templates use the tasks prefix to refer to another task, for example {{tasks.generate-artifact.outputs.artifacts.hello-art}}.

Artifacts are packaged as Tarballs and gzipped by default. You may customize this behavior by specifying an archive strategy, using the archive field. For example:

<... snipped ...>
    outputs:
      artifacts:
        # default behavior - tar+gzip default compression.
      - name: hello-art-1
        path: /tmp/hello_world.txt

        # disable archiving entirely - upload the file / directory as is.
        # this is useful when the container layout matches the desired target repository layout.   
      - name: hello-art-2
        path: /tmp/hello_world.txt
        archive:
          none: {}

        # customize the compression behavior (disabling it here).
        # this is useful for files with varying compression benefits, 
        # e.g. disabling compression for a cached build workspace and large binaries, 
        # or increasing compression for "perfect" textual data - like a json/xml export of a large database.
      - name: hello-art-3
        path: /tmp/hello_world.txt
        archive:
          tar:
            # no compression (also accepts the standard gzip 1 to 9 values)
            compressionLevel: 0
<... snipped ...>

Artifacts¶

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