GitHub stops returning expired Actions artifacts from the REST API
Victoria Shinder2 min readGitHub changed what an expired Actions artifact looks like from the outside on 24 September. Until now an artifact whose retention window had passed stayed on the workflow run summary wearing an "Expired" label, even though the bytes had already been removed from storage. That row is gone, and so are the corresponding entries from two REST endpoints: the one that lists artifacts for a repository and the one that fetches a single artifact. The reason given is billing confusion - the label left people unsure whether they were still paying to store files that no longer existed.
Two things are explicitly unchanged. Retention settings behave exactly as before, and so does billing; this is a display and enumeration change, not a lifecycle change. And the information is not lost: which artifacts a run produced is still recoverable from that run's own logs.
What it means
The API half is the one that can break something quietly. Any script that walked the artifact list for a repository and counted, diffed, or archived what it found will now get a shorter list for older runs, with no error and no signal that the shape of the answer changed. If a pipeline used the presence of an expired-but-listed artifact as a marker - "this run has been cleaned up" versus "this run was never processed" - that distinction has just evaporated, and the failure mode is a job that decides there is nothing to do.
The billing rationale is worth taking at face value rather than as a euphemism. A UI element that shows an object which does not exist is a real defect in an interface people use to reason about a bill, and removing it is the right call. But it illustrates a general cost of fixing that class of bug: the same row was doing two jobs, one bad (implying storage still consumed) and one useful (implying history), and only the bad one was intended. Anyone who relied on the second job now needs the run logs, which are a worse index than an API - per-run rather than per-repository, and ageing out on their own schedule.