Best practices for persistence between Github Actions workflow runs

[JJ]

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My use case here is to save PR information, so that next run we can compare current information with the old one. This information is a version, but in principle could be any other. I have been trying different options for this

1. Use artifacts. However, you need the workflow run ID to retrieve an artifact, so if you save the version in artifact you would actually need to save the workflow run in, well, some persistent storage, so it's just kicking the ball down the field.
2. Use caches. The issue with caches is that this is really not an use case. For starters, it's not permanent storage, lasting up to 7 days only. After that, you're out in the cold. Anyway, you can't restore (old value) and set (new value for next run) in the same workflow, even if you use the new restore/save features. It will simply yield errors, either not saving the cache after a cache hit of refusing to alter the value of the cache after it's been saved. What I was doing here is setting the file name to be cached to the variable name, and the content of the file to the value; the variable name was used also as cache key. I haven't been able to invalidate cache in any way, even using the gh command line (not permitted).
3. Use the repo. Since this is something I want between PR check runs, this is not really a good option. Bad comes to worse, this is the least-resistance path, but I would be allowing a PR to modify the repo, which can lead to all kinds of trouble.

I'm out of options here. Any idea?

PS: I'm using actions/cache@v4 for the cache. I don't think using the API directly will help. And in any rate, the 7-day limit would hurt.

[tbrowder]

Hi,JJ! I don't have any bril ideas, but can you give a short example of data and use you are looking for?

Oh, version info...hm.

Still not sure of exactly what you are trying to do. But from peeking inside lots of
workflow runs I've noticed debugging info does appear in the log in some cases.

Would inserting the version info in such a number help? Perhaps add an additional debug string with more data?

[JJ]

I am checking student submissions, which need to be versioned. I need to check if the new version is strictly bigger than the previous one, and the previous one can be either on the filesystem (in a file that has been already merged in main) or in the previous version of the PR body. So I need to have something that looks like last-version/student-nick => 0.2.3
Right now the workaround is to store the last version merged in a specific file, and check PR diffs for new version. It's a very specific solution for my specific problem, but I was looking, in general, to a general solution to a general problem, persistence between workflows.
GitLab seems to be built so that there's a generic mechanism for doing so, artifacts. They are simply directories available to the workflow that are saved at the end of the workflow and restored in the next (as far as I understand it, could be wrong and they might be saved only for other jobs in the workflow). Github does not seem to have one like that.

[JJ]

Anything that is tied to a workflow run would have the same issue, you need the ID to access it.

[tbrowder]

I have been looking more closely at GitLab again (mainly due to Raku.land using it) and, if I were younger, I think I would move all my stuff there.

If I'm not mistaken, I think it has a very good API for we CLI folks.

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