Delete old packages

GitHub action for deleting old versions of packages in the GitHub package registry.

This is very similar to actions/delete-package-versions but targets a different use case.

The action works by getting a list of packages with at most the oldest 100 versions of each, applying the filters (see table below) on them and then deleting the matching versions.

If you have more than 100 versions and none of the 100 oldest versions match, no package versions will be deleted!

Inputs

Name	Description	Required	Default
user	User containing the package(s)
organization	Organization containing the package(s)
names	Names of the package(s)	✔️
type	The type of package (e.g. npm)	✔️
semver-pattern	Semver range of the versions
version-pattern	Regex pattern of the versions		^.+$
keep	Number of versions to exclude from deletions		2
token	Token with the necessary scopes to delete package versions	Depends on the package	Set by GitHub
dry-run	If the action should only print what it would do		false

⚠️ Certain options can not be combined with each other and will lead to errors. These are:

• user and organization.
• semver-pattern and version-pattern.

Supported package types as of the current version are: npm, maven, rubygems, docker, nuget and container.

A token might be needed, based on which package you are trying to delete. Tokens can be generated here and need to be added as a secret to the repository (Settings -> Security -> Secrets and variables -> Actions).

Example usage

Delete old versions of the packages "package-1" and "package-2" for the organization "my-organization".

uses: smartsquaregmbh/delete-old-packages@v0.8.1
with:
  organization: my-organization
  type: npm
  names: |
    package-1
    package-2

Delete old versions in the form of "1.0.0-RC1" of the package "package".

uses: smartsquaregmbh/delete-old-packages@v0.8.1
with:
  organization: my-organization
  type: npm
  version-pattern: "^\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+-RC\\d+$" # The regex needs to be escaped!
  names: |
    package

Delete old versions with a lower semver version than 2.x of the package "package".

uses: smartsquaregmbh/delete-old-packages@v0.8.1
with:
  organization: my-organization
  type: npm
  semver-pattern: "<2.x"
  names: |
    package

Delete old versions of the package "package" but keep at least 5 versions.

uses: smartsquaregmbh/delete-old-packages@v0.8.1
with:
  organization: my-organization
  type: npm
  keep: 5
  names: |
    package

Delete old versions of the package "package" with a token named "GH_ACCESS_TOKEN".

uses: smartsquaregmbh/delete-old-packages@v0.8.1
with:
  token: ${{ secrets.GH_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
  organization: my-organization
  type: npm
  names: |
    package

Rate limit

GitHub imposes a rate limit on API calls which might be triggered by excessive use of this action. Starting from version v0.8.0 this should be automatically handled: The rate limit retry after returned from the GitHub api during a request is used to wait before retrying, up to five times. If the rate limit is exceeded more than five times, the action will still fail.