GitHub Action - Delete Release Assets

This GitHub action lets you delete assets from existing GitHub releases. This is useful for scenarios where the artifacts of nightly builds are made available in a GitHub release and cannot be just overwritten because the asset names contain changing information like the build date or commit ID.

⚠ WARNING ⚠

Because this action has the power to delete any asset from any release in the repository (via the access token) be extra careful that you specify the correct tag!

Usage

Typical usage would be adding this action as a step before uploading new assets to a release (for example using the @actions/upload-release-asset GitHub action).

Inputs

name	required	default	description
assets	yes		Newline-delimited globs of asset names to delete from the release. See the example below for supported formats.
fail-if-no-assets	no	true	Fail the action if the release contains no matching assets.
fail-if-no-release	no	true	Fail the action if no release associated with the given tag was found.
token	yes		The token for authenticating against the GitHub API.
tag	yes		The name of the tag. This uniquely identifies the release. May either be a tag name directly (like v1.0.0) or a tag ref (like refs/tags/v1.0.0 as is provided by github.ref or GITHUB_REF).

Outputs

name	example	description
deleted-assets	file1.txt;file2.zip	Semicolon-delimited list of deleted asset names.
release-id	1234	The unique ID of the github release from which the assets were deleted.

Example workflow

On every push to the staging branch delete existing assets from the release with the tag staging.

name: Stage build

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - stage

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        
      - name: Build project
        run: ./build
        
      - name: Delete old release assets
        uses: mknejp/delete-release-assets@v1
        with:
          token: ${{ github.token }}
          tag: staging # This may also be of the form 'refs/tags/staging'

          # Pick one of:
          # 1. a single file name
          assets: changelog.txt
          # 2. a glob pattern (note the quotes if it begins with *)
          assets: '*.zip'
          # 3. multiple names/globs, one per line
          assets: | 
            changelog.txt
            *.zip
            
      - name: Upload new release assets
        uses: actions/upload-release-assets@v1
        ...

License

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License.