Azure DevOps : where do artifacts live?

Question

I've been using the publish and download artifacts (both build and pipeline) tasks successfully but I'd like to understand more about how the overall process works:

1. where do these artifacts live when not specifying a UNC path ?
2. do artifacts expire (I read that they get deleted if the corresponding build gets deleted) ?
3. how are artifacts related to the build id ?

Answer 1

where do these artifacts live when not specifying a UNC path ?

By default, the published artifacts will be stored in Azure Pipelines.

You also can select a file share that can be accessible from the pipeline agent. Typically it is a valid UNC path on the self-hosted agent machine.

If you publish the artifacts into Azure Pipelines in a pipeline run, you can see the published artifacts on the details page of this run. The artifact files are stored in a folder that named with the artifact name you specified when publishing the artifact.

do artifacts expire (I read that they get deleted if the corresponding build gets deleted) ?

Build and Release artifacts will be available as long as that Build or Release run is retained, unless you specify how long to retain the artifacts. To view more details, you can see "About artifacts" and "Retention Policy".

how are artifacts related to the build id ?

If the artifacts are published to Azure Pipelines, as I mentioned above, the artifacts of each pipeline run are stored on the pipeline run itself. When you use the download artifacts task, you just need to specify the pipeline run where you want to download artifacts from.

If you publish the artifacts in a file share path on the agent, to distinguish the artifacts of each pipeline run, you set the artifact name contains the build ID or build number. For example, drop_$(Build.BuildId).