Docker Registry

Set up a secure private Docker registry in minutes to manage all your Docker images while exercising fine-grained access control. Artifactory places no limitations and lets you set up any number of Docker registries, through the use of local, remote and virtual Docker repositories, and works transparently with the Docker client to manage all your Docker images, whether created internally or downloaded from remote Docker resources such as Docker Hub.

Multiple Docker Registries

Artifactory lets you define as many Docker registries as you wish. This enables you to manage each project in a distinct registry and exercise better access control to your Docker images.

Use Docker Naturally

Artifactory supports the relevant calls of the Docker Registry API so that you can transparently use the Docker client to access images through Artifactory.

Secure private Docker Registry with Fine-grained Access Control

Local Docker Repositories are where you store internal Docker images for distribution across your organization. With the fine-grained access control provided by built-in security features, Artifactory offers secure Docker push and pull with local Docker repositories as fully functional, secure, private Docker registries. Consistent and reliable access to remote images Remote Docker Repositories in Artifactory proxy external resources such as Docker Hub, or a remote Docker repository in another Artifactory instance, and cache downloaded images. As a result, overall networking is reduced, and access to images on these remote resources is faster, consistent and reliable.Identity and Access

OCI Support

Artifactory is OCI compliant and supports OCI clients, enabling you to deploy and resolve OCI images in Docker Registries. The OCI client Singularity is not supported.

Docker Buildx Support

Artifactory supports Docker Buildx, allowing you to easily build and push multi-architecture images using the Docker buildx CLI. For more information, see Pushing Images in Bulk Using the Docker Buildx CLI. Confidently Promoting Images to Production Artifactory lets you promote Docker images, as immutable, stable binaries, through the quality gates all the way to production.

Unlimited Docker Hub access

Artifactory provides you with unlimited, high-performant access to Docker Hub and to Docker Official Images to simplify cloud-native application development, without Docker Hub image-pull limits. This allows you to streamline, automate and simplify the way DevOps teams work.

* Available to SaaS cloud JFrog Platform subscribers, including free subscription offered on AWS, GCP & Azure.

Both Artifactory and Docker use the term "repository", but each uses it in a different way.

A Docker repository is a hosted collection of tagged images that, together, create the file system for a container

A Docker registry is a host that stores Docker repositories

An Artifactory repository is a hosted collection of Docker repositories, effectively, a Docker registry in every way, and one that you can access transparently with the Docker client.

Since Artifactory places no limitation on the number of repositories you may create, you can manage any number of Docker registries in Artifactory.

Integration Benefits Docker Registry

There are these main ways to get started using Docker with Artifactory:

For more details, please refer to Getting Started with Artifactory as a Docker Registry.

Artifactory supports three types of repositories when working with Docker:

**Make sure to go to the Advanced tab of each repository and set the Registry Port if you are using the Port method for Docker. Then, the reverse proxy generator should add a new section in for the specified port.

Local Docker Repositories

A local Docker repository is where you can deploy and host your internal Docker images. It is, in effect, a Docker registry able to host collections of tagged Docker images which are your Docker Repositories. Once your images are hosted, you can exercise fine-grained access control, and share them across your organization through replication or by being proxied by repositories in other Artifactory instances.

To define a local Docker repository:

1. From the Administration module, select Repositories | Repositories | Local.

2. Click New Local Repository and select Docker from the Select Package Type dialog.

3. Set the Repository Key, and in the Docker Settings section, select V2 as the Docker API version.

4. Set Max Unique Tags. This specifies the maximum number of unique tags, per repository, that should be stored for a Docker image. Once the number of tags for an image exceeds this number, older tags will be removed. Leaving the field blank (default) means all tags will be stored.

Virtual Docker Repositories

Artifactory supports virtual Docker Repositories. A Virtual Repositories defined in Artifactory aggregates images from both local and remote repositories that are included in the virtual repositories.

This allows you to access images that are hosted locally on local Docker repositories, as well as remote images that are proxied by remote Docker repositories, and access all of them from a single URL defined for the virtual repository. Using virtual repositories can be very useful since users will continue to work with the virtual repository while the admin can manage the included repositories, replace the default deployment target and those changes will be transparent to the users.

To define a virtual Docker repository follow the steps below:

1. From the Administration module, select Repositories | Repositories | Virtual.

2. Click New Virtual Repository and select Docker from the Select Package Type dialog.

3. Set the Repository Key value.

4. Select the underlying local and remote Docker repositories to include under the Repositories section.

5. You can optionally also configure your Default Deployment Repository . This is the repository to which Docker images uploaded to this virtual repository will be routed, and once this is configured, your virtual Docker repository is a fully-fledged Docker registry. Using the default deployment repository, you can set up your virtual repository to wrap a series of repositories that represent the stages of your pipeline, and then promote images from the default deployment repository through the pipeline to production. Any repository that represents a stage in your pipeline within this virtual repository can be configured with permissions for authenticated or unauthenticated (anonymous) access according to your needs.

Resolve Latest Docker Image

To set your virtual Docker repository to pull Docker images according to their modification time, enable Resolve Docker Tags By Latest Timestamp. This is useful in scenarios where two or more aggregated repositories contain the same tag name. For example, busybox:1.1.

When enabled, instead of fetching the image that is positioned higher in the resolution order in the virtual repository, Artifactory will return the Docker image last deployed to one of the aggregated repositories in the Virtual repository. Artifactory will first try to fetch the tag from the Local repositories according to the modification time, if not found, it will continue to try to fetch the image from the Remote repositories according to the resolution order.

This functionality is useful for multi-site environments where you create the same image on two different instances.

REST API

This can also be configured by setting the resolveDockerTagsByTimestamp parameter to true (false by default) when creating a new repository using REST API.Create Repository

Artifactory supports promoting Docker images from one Docker repository in Artifactory to another.

Promoting is useful when you need to move Docker images through different acceptance and testing stages, for example, from a development repository, through the different gateways all the way to production. Instead of rebuilding the image multiple times using promotion will ensure the image you will have in your production environment is the one built by your CI server and passed all the relevant tests.

Promotion can be triggered using the following endpoint with cURL:

POST api/docker/<repoKey>/v2/promote
{ 
    "targetRepo" : "<targetRepo>",  
    "dockerRepository" : "<dockerRepository>",  
    "tag" : "<tag>", 
        "targetTag" : "<tag>",
    "copy": <true | false>
}

where:

An example for promoting the docker image jfrog/ubuntu"] with all of its tags from docker-local to docker-prod using cURL would be:

curl -i -uadmin:password -X POST "https://artprod.company.com/api/docker/<repoKey>/v2/promote" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"targetRepo":"docker-prod","dockerRepository":"jfrog/ubuntu"}'

https://artprod.company.com/api/docker/ <repoKey>/v2/promote

Notice that the above example is executed through your reverse proxy. To go directly through Artifactory, you would execute this command as follows:

curl -i -uadmin:password -X POST "http://localhost:8080/artifactory/api/docker/docker-local/v2/promote" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"targetRepo":"docker-prod","dockerRepository":"jfrog/ubuntu"}'

The following example adds retagging with a specific version of the jfrog/ubuntu image (4.9.0) being retagged to latest as it gets promoted:

curl -i -uadmin:password -X POST "https://artprod.company.com/api/docker/docker-local/v2/promote" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"targetRepo":"docker-prod","dockerRepository":"jfrog/ubuntu", "tag" : "4.9.0", "targetTag" : "latest"}'

For general information on how to browse repositories, please refer to Browsing Artifactory.

The Docker Info tab presents three sections: Tag Info, Docker Tag Visualization, and Labels.

Tag Info

Presents basic details about the selected tag.

Field	Description
Title	The Docker tag name.
Digest	The tag's SHA 256 digest.
Total Size	The total size of the image
Label Count	The number of labels attached to this tag. Tip Click the label count to view the attached labels at the bottom of the screen.

Docker Tag Visualization

This section maps the entire set of commands used to generate the selected tag along with the digest of the corresponding layer. Essentially, you would see the same series of commands using docker history.

You can select any layer of the image to view the following properties.

Symbol	Property
	The layer ID
	The layer size
	The timestamp when the layer was created
	The command that created the layer
	The digest