ARTIFACTORY: How to stop "Unable to fetch catalog" errors in the artifactory logs

The List Docker Repositories API lets you list images available in a repo. However, when this API is used against a remote repository (or a virtual with a remote aggregated within), you may see the below error.

“Unable to fetch catalog from 'https://registry-1.docker.io/v2/_catalog?': HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized”

This is due to the remote repository upstream site not supporting the _catalog API, and is usually not an issue, but the error may be misleading.

Resolution:

To prevent Artifactory from logging this, you can enable the below system property under

$JFROG_HOME/var/etc/artifactory/artifactory.system.properties for 7.x, or $ARTIFACTORY_HOME/etc/artifactory.system.properties for 6.x. 

This property will ensure Artifactory only tries to list tags from the remote repository cache, and not from the upstream.

artifactory.docker.cache.remote.repo.tags.and.catalog=<upstream url>

For example, for the error above:

artifactory.docker.cache.remote.repo.tags.and.catalog=https://registry-1.docker.io/,https://gcr.io