Blocked by Github yet again
2026-05-21 02:59:36 +07:00 by Mark Smith
According to the Github account usage page I have used up all my Actions storage quota of 500MB, so it is blocking all my builds that use artifacts.The website's build uses artifacts to pass the built website between jobs, which is the Github recommended way to do things. Thus all builds of the website and thus all publishing to the website is completely blocked. I haven't even been publishing much the past few weeks!
This isn't the first time Github has blocked me completely but it is the first time it has done it on the basis of storage. In the past it has always been because of running out of free build minutes. The thing that is very strange about the storage quota is that as far as storage goes I am very conservative, setting a retention of 1 day on all artifacts I generate, and I only run 1 build per day, so it's very odd that I am over the quota suddenly. I have been publishing without storage problems in this, the recommended way, literally for years.
When I did some investigation on the command line using Github's gh tool I could see hundreds and hundreds of old artifacts on the system which would have totalled several GB in size. They were all "expired", because of the retension policy, but I would have expected these to get cleaned up. According to the LLM helping me I did everything correctly, and it looks like something on Github's side is suddenly trigering them to block.
Anyway I manually deleted all the expired artifacts, even though I shouldn't have to, so there are literally zero artifacts now, but even after a day the system is still blocking everything. The Github website says it will reset in 12 days.
They always seem to find some reason and way to block you, even when you spend years and years making everything perfect. I have emailed support, so hopefully I will hear back soon. This always seems to happen right when I'm putting the final fixes to software I'm building. Quite difficult to test a blogging tool when you aren't allowed to build your blog. The one small win is that since it's a static site powered by git I can still write posts offline, but right now it doesn't feel like much consolation. #