Pipeline artifact expiration

The release announcement for 13.12 mentions that

GitLab now automatically locks the latest artifact produced from a successful pipeline on any active branch,

That made me worry. Will this lead to uncontrolled disk usage like when GitLab started to keep the artifacts from the “latest” jobs? I put “latest” in quotes, because that was exactly the problem, many of our developers makes a new branch for each release (and possibly more), and as those branches “liGitLab now automatically locks the latest artifact produced from a successful pipeline on any active branch,ve” forever, artifacts are kept forever.

The linked documentaion links to an anchor named “artifactsexpire_in”, and that page directly says that “expire_in” does not affect pipeline artifacts. So that link basically strengthen my worries.

Can I do anything to prevent this bad behaviour?

Thanks for the ping @grove I answered this in the implementation issue but will copy here as well for future readers.

By default pipeline artifacts are deleted after 7 days if they are not locked. This feature locks the artifact if it is from the most recent successful pipeline and unlocks any other pipeline artifacts at the same time so they can be deleted at that 7 day mark. The result of this is a single pipeline artifact being persisted (the latest) beyond the 7 days it would have been before the feature was implemented.

I’ve created an issue to create an instance level config for this feature for feedback from customers.

I also realized our documentation is not clear about this so opened an MR to clarify.

-James H, GitLab Product Manager, Verify:Testing