Seems Github Actions' Artifacts ain't quite ready for us

[dan-fritchman]

Specifically, this comment in our README won't fly, at least not for free -

https://github.com/Vlsir/Hdl21Schematics#installing-the-schematic-editor

Hdl21 schematics use GitHub Actions for per-build CI testing. This includes building the editor VsCode Extension and the desktop app for each supported platform: MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux (note https://github.com/Vlsir/Hdl21Schematics/issues/18). Note that GitHub Actions builds each on x86-architecture hardware. Other architectures - notably ARM64-based Macs - can instead be built from source. (And it's not hard!) Pre-built editors are downloadable from the artifacts section of each GitHub Action run:

Turns out they do allow free "artifact uploads"... but not much. 500 MB / month, according to this page, as of this writing:
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-packages/about-billing-for-github-packages

Now, it seems to actually grant a bit more than that. The screenshot of uploaded artifacts in that very same passage says that the app-bundle for its commit was 673 MB - so more than the limit to even upload one:

Whatever the actual limit is - maybe the 2GB or 10GB listed elsewhere in that table - we hit it in just a few commits.

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What to Do

Umbrella options:

1. Find another home for artifact storage
2. Don't try to upload so much stuff

Under option (1) I'm all ears; I know there are plenty such providers out there, but don't have any particular preference/ affinity for, or experience with, any of them. Primary criteria: (1) must be 110% easy, both to produce from CI and to download, and (2) must be free (or, more accurately, not paid by this project's authors).

Under option (2):

• Maybe just upload artifacts for tagged commits/ releases
• Maybe upload the VsCode Extension more often than the OS-native desktop apps

It makes sense that the former would be much smaller. The desktop apps need the whole node runtime, electron libraries, whatever OS-specific stuff they use, etc. The VsCode Extension would just contain (I expect?) our code and its dependencies; all that other stuff is part of the VsCode application itself.

That said - it's concerning that the packaged VsCode Extension for recent (maybe all) CI-side builds is only about 200 KB. When I build it locally, I get a result artifact that is more like 14MB:

$ ll hdl21-schematics-vscode-0.0.1.vsix 
-rw-r--r--  1 dan  staff    14M Dec 11 13:41 hdl21-schematics-vscode-0.0.1.vsix

Perhaps that is relying on more "stuff" from the build environment than we realized.

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For Now

Gotta at least get this out of the README as a recommended method of installation.

[dan-fritchman]

05a0868 has the easy part, temporarily removing the GH Artifacts from the README documentation.

[curtisma]

hmm, yeah, figuring out why the "app" is >600MB will be important. Maybe have it stored somewhere else instead. I believe Matthias has Klayout set up to upload to Dropbox.

For some of my projects, I've had them set up to release toGitHub Releases for all tagged releases. GitHub actions can include the generated artifacts as part of a draft release.

You could also reduce the lifetime of artifacts.

For the VS Code extension, you could have it released to the VS Code marketplace and distribute it that way.

[ThomasPluck]

Seconding upload to VS Code Marketplace, this is a very convenient method.

[dan-fritchman]

Totally agree!