GitHub Action to prune/delete container versions from GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io).

By default, both untagged and tag-regex inputs are disabled and as result no versions will be matched for pruning. Either or both inputs must be explicitly configured for versions to be pruned. This behaviour helps to avoid pruning versions by mistake when first configuring this action.

As this action is destructive, it's recommended to test any changes to the configuration of the action with a dry-run to ensure the expected versions are matched for pruning. For more details about dry-runs, see the dry-run input.

This is especially true when the tag-regex input is used as the regular expression can easily match all versions of a container and result in complete deletion of all available versions.

steps:
  - name: Prune
    uses: vlaurin/action-ghcr-prune@main
    with:
      token: ${{ secrets.YOUR_TOKEN }}
      organization: your-org
      container: your-container
      dry-run: true # Dry-run first, then change to `false`
      older-than: 7 # days
      keep-last: 2
      untagged: true

This action uses the Github Rest API deletePackageVersionForOrg() resource which states:

To use this endpoint, you must have admin permissions in the organization and authenticate using an access token with the packages:read and packages:delete scopes. In addition: [...] If package_type is container, you must also have admin permissions to the container you want to delete.

As a result, for this action to work, the token must be associated to a user who has admin permissions for both the organization and the package. If this is not the case, then dry-runs will work as expected but actual runs will fail with a Package not found error when attempting to delete versions.

Required Secret access token with scopes packages:read and packages:delete and write permissions on the targeted container. See Creating a personal access token for more details about GitHub access tokens.

Name of the organization owning the container package. (if empty, the packages of the authenticated user are considered)

Required Name of the container package for which versions should be pruned.

Optional Boolean controlling whether to execute the action as a dry-run. When true the action will print out details of the version that will be pruned without actually deleting them. Defaults to false.

As this action is destructive, it's recommended to test any changes to the configuration of the action with a dry-run to ensure the expected versions are matched for pruning.

Optional Minimum age in days of a version before it is pruned. Defaults to 0 which matches all versions of a container.

Optional Count of most recent, matching containers to exclude from pruning. Defaults to 0 which means that all matching containers are pruned.

Optional Boolean controlling whether untagged versions should be pruned (true) or not (false). Defaults to false.

Optional Regular expression which will be evaluated against all tags of a version. Any version with at least one tag matching the expression will be pruned. Disabled by defaults.

⚠️ Please note: Extra care should be taken when using tag-regex, please make sure you've read the Word of caution

Optional Regular expression which will be evaluated against all tags of a version. Any version with at least one tag matching the expression will be ignored. Disabled by defaults.

The count of container versions which were successfully pruned by the action.

This action is compiled into a single JS file using @vercel/ncc. This produces a dist/ folder which must be checked in with the code.

Compilation can be done using:

npm run build

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License.