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:
From the Administration module, select Repositories | Repositories | Virtual.
Click New Virtual Repository and select Docker from the Select Package Type dialog.
Set the Repository Key value.
Select the underlying local and remote Docker repositories to include under the Repositories section.
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.
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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.
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