How to delete artifacts directory on gitlab runner after uploading them to gitlab? - gitlab

Question

I'm trying to create a gitlab job that shows a metric for test code coverage. To do that, I'm creating a .coverage file and placing it in a directory that uploads artifacts. In a subsequent stage the artifacts are downloaded and consumed by a coverage tool to produce a coverage report. I noticed that the artifacts are not deleted when the gitlab runner finishes the job and are bloating my filesystem. How can I remove the artifacts directory after the artifacts are uploaded?
Here's what we currently have
stages:
- test
- build
before_script:
- export GITLAB_ARTIFACT_DIR="$(pwd)"/artifacts
[...]
some-test:
stage: test
script:
- [some script that puts something in ${GITLAB_ARTIFACTS_DIR}
artifacts:
expire_in: 4 days
paths:
- artifacts/
some-other-test:
stage: test
script:
- [some script that puts something in ${GITLAB_ARTIFACTS_DIR}
artifacts:
expire_in: 4 days
paths:
- artifacts/
[...]
coverage:
stage: build
before_script:
script:
- [our coverage script]
coverage: '/TOTAL.*\s+(\d+%)$/'
artifacts:
expire_in: 4 days
paths:
- artifacts/
when: always
[...]
after_script:
- sudo rm -rf "${GITLAB_ARTIFACT_DIR}"
According to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/4146 after_script does not have access to before_script or scripts environment variables.

Answer 1

A solution could be to use cache and artifact simultaneously.
This config will create a new directory depending of the job id ($CI_JOB_ID) for each job execution :
stages:
- test
remote:
stage: test
script :
- mkdir cache-$CI_JOB_ID
- echo hello> cache-$CI_JOB_ID/foo.txt
cache:
key: build-cache
paths:
- cache-$CI_JOB_ID/
artifacts:
paths:
- cache-$CI_JOB_ID/foo.txt
expire_in: 1 week
At the next run, the previous cache-$CI_JOB_ID will be removed and replace by a new directory (as the $CI_JOB_ID will be different). This will keep only one instance of your cached file until the next job execution.
Note : you need to prefix the directory name with cache- otherwise the .gitlab-ci.yml is invalid.