Drive Memory

Drive memory is an experimental, feature-gated integration backed by the GitHub Drives preview. Do not configure it unless GitHub has explicitly enrolled the repository in the private preview.

Preview behavior

For enrolled preview repositories, the compiler mounts configured drives into the agent at /tmp/gh-aw/drive-memory/ (or /tmp/gh-aw/drive-memory-{id}/ for named entries). It grants the generated job contents: read, id-token: write, and the required drives permission.

The compiler checks out each drive before the agent and commits validated changes afterward. With threat detection enabled, it stages drive contents as an artifact; a separate update_drive_memory job publishes it only after detection succeeds and verifies the drive has not changed since checkout.

Drive names are repository-wide and branch-aware according to the preview service. GitHub Drives allows one active writer for a drive, so overlapping runs that write the same drive can contend for the writer lease.

Drive size

disk-size sets the size used when creating a new drive; it is ignored for an existing drive. The value must be a number with an optional K, M, G, or T suffix (for example 100M). Suffixes such as 1GB are rejected at compile time. Leading/trailing whitespace is trimmed and lowercase suffixes (for example 100m) are normalized to upper case automatically. A drive of 100M is enough for typical memory files:

tools:
  drive-memory:
    drive-name: my-drive
    disk-size: 100M

Limitations

GitHub-hosted ubuntu-latest is the supported preview runner.
Repositories must be enrolled in the GitHub Drives preview.
Drive mounts are not supported inside job containers.
The upstream actions currently have no versioned release, so gh-aw pins the preview main commit.
Do not store secrets in drive memory.