Github Actions, Azure Devops "Publish Pipeline Artifact" Equivalent?

Question

I see that Microsoft is likely going to move in the direction of shying away from Azure DevOps and more heavily leaning on GitHub Actions as a primary automation platform (speculation, not sure if it's true), so I am trying to move all of my automation off of DevOps onto GitHub Actions and when doing so I noticed that there are some lacking similarities.

In this specific case, I am wondering if there is an equivalent to Azure DevOps "Publish Pipeline Artifacts" task in GitHub Actions?

The closest thing I can find in GitHub Actions is "actions/upload-artifact@v2", however this more similarly resembles Azure DevOps' "Publish build artifacts". I get the use case and understand what I could use it for, but I want to see if I can upload an entire Pipeline/workflow in a package, rather than file by file.

In Azure DevOps, my pipeline runs in < 5-7 minutes because I can use the "Publish Pipeline Artifacts" task, but in GitHub Actions, I only have the "actions/upload-artifact@v2" action and now it takes up to 3 hours to do the same automation tasks. (Insane difference!). I think the added time is due to the upload/publish task in GitHub Actions going file by file whereas in Azure DevOps, the upload/publish task somehow condenses it all and it only takes ~1 minute for it to finish.

Any/All help is greatly appreciated! My Google Fu is not coming up with anything atm.

Answer 1

It is slow because:

GZip is used internally to compress individual files before starting an upload.

So this is not only the case due to the fact that each file is sent individually but each file is also compressed individually. Your best workaround at the moment would be compress whole directory as riQQ already wrote.

It can be done like this:

  - name: 'Tar files'
    run: tar -cvf my_files.tar /path/to/my/directory

  - name: 'Upload Artifact'
    uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
    with:
      name: my-artifact
      path: my_files.tar    

A big drawback is that now you need to each time unpack your artifact when you download it.

For more details please check this topic - Upload artifact dir is very slow