Firebase storage artifacts

Question

I' trying to understand what eu.artifacts.%PROJECT NAME%.appspot.com is. It's currently taking up 800mb of storage from my daily 5gb limit. It contains only application/octet-stream type of files. This bucket was created automatically and the file path is eu.artifacts....appspot.com/containers/images. 2 heaviest files there weight as much as 200mb and 130mb. I tried deleting it but it was automatically created again. Users can upload pictures on my website but that bucket currently only takes about 10mb containing all the user images.

So my question is: What is this bucket for and why does it weight so much?

Answer 1

firebaser here

If you are using Cloud Functions, the files you're seeing are related to a recent change in how the runtime (for Node 10 and up) is built.

Cloud Functions now uses Cloud Build to create the runtime (for Node 10 and up) for your Cloud Functions. And Cloud Build in turn uses Container Registry to store those runtimes, which stores them in a new Cloud Storage bucket under your project.

For more on this, also see this entry in the Firebase pricing FAQ on Why will I need a billing account to use Node.js 10 or later for Cloud Functions for Firebase?

Also see this thread on the firebase-talk mailing list about these artifacts.

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🛑 Update: some other answers suggest deleting artifacts from the Storage buckets, and even setting up lifecycle management on them to do so automatically. This leads to dangling references to those artifacts in the Container Registry, which breaks future builds.

To safely get rid of the artifacts, delete the container from the Container Registry console (it's under the gcf folder) or with a script. That will then in turn also delete the artifacts from your Storage bucket.

Since version 9.14 of the CLI, the firebase deploy process automatically cleans up its container images after a deploy. So if you upgrade to the latest version, you should no longer get additional artifacts in your storage buckets.

Answer 2

I've consulted GCP support and here are a few things

• Cloud Functions caused the surge in storage usage
• Since these artifacts are not stored in the default bucket, they'll charge you even if your total bytes stored are not reaching the free tier limit
• Remove the artifact bucket at https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser. According to the support staff

Regarding the artifacts bucket, you can actually get rid of them, as they are storing previous versions of the function. However, I do not recommend deleting the "gcf-sources..." bucket(s) , as it contains the current image, so deleting this bucket would mess up your function.

I tried to remove it in whole, and so far it is not causing trouble. I'll update if it break things later.

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Edit 201118: See comment below and you might need to keep the bucket while removing all the content in it.