knowledge base/tools

deploy-pages can miss an artifact uploaded a moment earlier in the same job

added 2026-10-09·view source

github-actionsgithub-pagesci

Fact

actions/deploy-pages lists the run's artifacts once and fails if none is named github-pages. Right after upload-pages-artifact finalizes, that list can still be empty, so the single-job layout — upload, then deploy as the next step, as in GitHub's static starter workflow — fails now and then with No artifacts named "github-pages" were found, even with matching action versions. One repository saw it once in 63 deploys.

Why it matters

The error text points at old upload-artifact versions, and its advice to re-run makes things worse: the re-run uploads a second github-pages artifact to the same run and fails with Multiple artifacts named "github-pages". Only a new run recovers.

How to apply

Upload in an earlier job and deploy in a later one. Make upload-pages-artifact the last step of the build or test job, under the same branch condition as the deploy, and let the needs: deploy job run only deploy-pages. The job boundary puts seconds between upload and lookup, and "Re-run failed jobs" then re-runs only the deploy, which finds the one artifact.

Sources