Cleanup after build

Cleanup the work directory for self hosted runners after they finish building.

Example usage

- uses: mickem/clean-after-action@v2

It is important that this is run before any caching tasks as cleanups are run in reverse order (and you do not want to cleanup before the caching is saved).

A more full example:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: onprem
    steps:
    - uses: mickem/clean-after-action@v2
    - uses: actions/checkout@v7
    - uses: actions/cache@v4
    # ....

Requirements

The action runs on the node24 runtime, which needs a runner recent enough to provide it (GitHub hosted runners, or a self hosted runner on a current release). Older releases are still available as @v1.

Inputs

keepGit

Set this to true to prevent the .git folder to be deleted.

- uses: mickem/clean-after-action@v2
  with:
    keepGit: true

The input is off unless it is set: false, 0, no, n, off and an empty value keep the default behaviour of deleting everything, any other value keeps the .git folder.

paths

By default everything in the workspace is deleted. Set paths to clean up only part of it: glob patterns relative to the workspace, one per line. Prefix a pattern with ! to keep what it matches.

- uses: mickem/clean-after-action@v2
  with:
    paths: |
      build
      *.log

Keeping something is the ! form, so this deletes everything except the .git folder (the same thing keepGit: true does):

- uses: mickem/clean-after-action@v2
  with:
    paths: |
      *
      !.git

Note that * means "everything in the workspace", including dot files. Do not use . for that: . matches the workspace directory itself, so it would delete the workspace along with anything a later ! pattern was meant to keep. The action refuses to do that and warns instead, but * is what you want.

keepGit: true still works alongside paths and always wins, so .git survives regardless of what the patterns match.

What about docker actions?

If you use docker actions files will be created by "root" and this action will fail to delete generated files.

This can be solved by forcing docker containers to run as the same user as the user which runs your self hosted runner. To do this you can use the user-remap feature in docker.

Motivation

There are a number of other actions which "solves this problem" by deleting files as the action runs (instead of as a cleanup action). The main problem with running clean up as a build step is that it will run "before other cleanup steps". This will effectively break things like caching and similar things which require files to be left when their cleanup runs.

A similar argument can be made for running cleanup before you build, this means the disk will eventually become full as more and more projects build.

Development

The action has no build step: index.js and cleanup.js are what the runner executes.

npm ci
npm test              # unit and end to end tests
npm run test:coverage # the same tests with coverage thresholds enforced

Tests live in test/ and run on the node test runner, so there is no test framework to install. test/cleanup.test.js covers the cleaning logic against real temporary directories and test/action.test.js starts the entry points the way the runner does (node cleanup.js with the INPUT_* environment variables set) and checks the runtime declared in action.yml.

See RELEASING.md for how a release is built and published.