# Allow storing download size in Artifacts.toml?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/allow-storing-download-size-in-artifacts-toml/126215>\
**Category:** Package Management\
**Tags:** question\
**Created:** [February 23, 2025, 6:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/allow-storing-download-size-in-artifacts-toml/126215 "2025-02-23T18:05:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nhz2](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nhz2/32/44428_2.png) [@nhz2](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nhz2)\
**Post date:** [February 23, 2025, 6:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/allow-storing-download-size-in-artifacts-toml/126215/1 "2025-02-23T18:05:57Z")

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Currently, the “Artifacts.toml” file requires each download entry to contain a “sha256” and a “url”. Including the compressed size of the tarball could be useful.

Some of the benefits are.

1. It would be easier to tell if a package will download large artifacts just by looking at its git repo.
2. If a bad url tries to download a huge file when the expected tarball is small, this can be used to quickly abort the download, instead of needing to wait until the whole sha256 can be calculated.

I think a new “size” field would need to be optional to be a non-breaking change.

Is this something that the Pkg.jl maintainers would be interested in supporting?

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**Author:** ![StefanKarpinski](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stefankarpinski/32/24_2.png) [@StefanKarpinski](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StefanKarpinski)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2025, 12:44am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/allow-storing-download-size-in-artifacts-toml/126215/2 "2025-02-24T00:44:35Z")

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Yeah, seems like a good idea. @staticfloat, what do you think? And what would we need to change?

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**Author:** ![staticfloat](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/staticfloat/32/34_2.png) [@staticfloat](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/staticfloat)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2025, 6:57am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/allow-storing-download-size-in-artifacts-toml/126215/4 "2025-02-24T06:57:58Z")

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Yeah, I think this was considered in the past, but just never got implemented. I have put up something that can be critiqued here: [Artifacts: Add download size to `Artifacts.toml` by staticfloat · Pull Request #4171 · JuliaLang/Pkg.jl · GitHub](https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/pull/4171)