Provide files for claude

[levino]

It seems claude is unable to use / download files which have been attached to the issues. What is best way to provide some files to claude to use, say a PDF or some images or so?

[Omrigotlieb]

The cleanest pattern is to make the files local before Claude runs.

Issue attachments are uploaded to GitHub as attachment URLs, but they are not automatically placed in the runner workspace. Claude Code Action works best when the PDF/image is either:

1. committed in the repo,
2. downloaded in a previous workflow step into ${{ github.workspace }}, or
3. downloaded as an artifact and then referenced by local path.

If the file lives outside the main checkout, add that directory with --add-dir.

So for PDFs/images I’d download them first, then prompt Claude with the local path instead of expecting it to read the issue attachment directly.

[levino]

This is about the claude code github action. At least my question was about that. I guess committing the files in advance is the only choice, which is quite cumbersome, I find. Why is claude not able to download the attachments to an issue? Seems like a bug to me.

[Omrigotlieb]

I think this is more a missing feature than a guaranteed bug.

GitHub stores issue attachments as attachment URLs, and the issue/comment event gives the action the comment body, not a staged local file in the runner workspace. So Claude sees a URL in markdown, not a local PDF/image.

For public repos those attachment URLs should be fetchable in principle, so having claude-code-action automatically recognize and download them would be a reasonable feature request. For private repos it gets trickier because the URL is not public.

Today the reliable workaround is still a preprocessing step that extracts attachment URLs from the issue/comment body, downloads them into ${{ github.workspace }}, and then points Claude at the local paths.

[levino]

I did not get that you meant to include the download step in the github action. Would you have a working example ci.yaml? Might be very interesting for onlookers.