Deploy your own private docker registry 2017

Software	Version
Docker	>= 1.6.0

Before moving the stack into Kubernetes, you might think about mangage a private docker registry. Docker registry is imporant in your Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline. This article shows how to deploy a private docker registry with S3 storage and legency disk space.

By default, docker engine uses the docker images at https://hub.docker.com/. But you can use docker images prefix with domain name, port number such as localhost:5000/myimage.

The benefit of mantain a private docker registry

Fully owned images and full control
Integrate with your own deployment pipeline and development workflow
Privacy and security
Cost efficient

Docker had renamed the project of docker registry to be Docker Distribution, which is rewritten with Golang for performance reason. The project location is https://github.com/docker/distribution.

How to deploy your own private docker registry

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart=always --name registry \
  -v `pwd`/data:/var/lib/registry \
  registry:2

Then you can access the private docker registry with location localhost:5000/

Private Docker registry Authenticate

You can put nginx at the front of docker registry and setup the authenticate at Nginx.

Docker registry disk space clean up and GC

Docker registry only store the same docker layers once. Users can delete a particular layer which is just marking the layer can be GC.

Docker registry GC

bin/registry garbage-collect [--dry-run] /path/to/config.yml

How to use the private docker registry

Pull images from Docker Hub public registry

docker pull ubuntu

Create tag of the image on the private registry

docker tag myimage localhost:5000/myimage

Push the image to the private registry

docker push localhost:5000/myimage

Search image

docker search localhost:5000/alpine

Alternative docker registry solutions

Google container registry

Google only charege the storage and network egress, if you are running the system inside Google Cloud, this could be a better choice: https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/pricing

AWS EC2 Container registry

AWS fully managed docker container registry also only charge the storage and data transferred to the internet: https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/