---
title: "Working with Artifacts"
image: "https://docs.virdx.dev/img/virdx-social-card.png"
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.virdx.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Working with Artifacts

*Artifacts* are a way to represent larger amounts of data that may be impractical to store individually in vxData. 
The primary motivation behind artifacts is the need to store + represent experiment-specific compiled, processed sets of data.

An artifact is just a payload like any other, but it records fields relevant for experiments:
- Provenance: git identifiers for the artifact-producing code
- Files: Additional dataframes or other files on disk/S3.
- Hardware Resources used to compute the artifact as well as a free text description.

## Storing Artifacts

Artifacts are usually created by triggering the artifact generation job from the VirDx Dashboard frontend.
This operation will produce the initial artifact resource - your code then later only appends the generated data/files to the artifact.

```py
# this initial artefact creation is usually done automatically for you
client.artefacts.create(
ArtefactCreate(
    identifier=f"artefact/{artefact_id}",
    github_repo="virdx/vxdata-workshop",
    github_branch=git["branch"],
    github_path="/",
    github_commit=git["commit"],
    created_by="vxdata-workshop",
    description="PSA features + ISUP labels for ISUP classification",
)
)

# your code then only runs this:
client.artefacts.attach_files(result, artefact_id=artefact_id)
```

Source: https://docs.virdx.dev/documentation/vxdata-api/guides/artifacts/index.mdx