How to get an artifact's parent directory?

[cbarrete]

Up until now, I have been following the documentation's suggestion of using cmd_args(my_artifact).parent() for this, but it doesn't work anymore as of the 2024-07-01 release. What is the suggested alternative?

[cormacrelf]

Basically all of the methods on cmd_args are migrating to kwargs, so it's cmd_args(artifact, parent = 1), or parent=2 to go two levels up.

Leave the issue open because the docs need fixing:

• As @cbarrete says, https://buck2.build/docs/api/build/artifact/ refers to .parent which is gone
• The remaining methods in the docs should probably be marked as deprecated. I thought relative_to was already gone? At least it was deprecated hard enough to force me to migrate, I think. Nevertheless you can recycle the docstring on relative_to for parent https://buck2.build/docs/api/build/cmd_args/
• The only hint as to how you should use parent= on the docs for cmd_args is the argument type being an integer https://buck2.build/docs/api/build/globals/#cmd_args

[zjturner]

Note that this doesn't really give you the artifact's parent directory. It gives you a cmd_args() that contains the artifact's parent directory as something that you can pass into an actions.run(). In particular, it does not give you the artifact's parent directory as an Artifact, so you can't use it (for example) to ctx.actions.symlinked_dir(...) or various other methods. And AFAICT, there is no way to do that.