Scope

If you don’t know, it seems Docker is starting to limit their free/anonymous tier at their container registry.

On Monday, November 2, 2020 at 9am Pacific Standard Time, Docker will begin enforcing rate limits on container pulls for Anonymous and Free users. Anonymous (unauthenticated) users will be limited to 100 container image pulls every six hours, and Free (authenticated) users will be limited to 200 container image pulls every six hours, when enforcement is fully implemented.

The above was taken from an email I received, needless to say I decided to migrate away from Docker Hub.

These are the steps I took to get to both quay.io and GitHub Container Registry, hopefully it’ll help someone in the future.

Note: If you want to see me figuring out this read time, this is my youtube video/stream.

Setup

First thing first, you need to install the app that’ll do the heavy lifting for you. This is from Red Hat and called skopeo. There’s a couple ways to do install it, check out the install.md for your operating system.

Login to Docker Registry

The first thing you do after getting skopeo installed, you need log into the Docker Registry, you do it by the following command:

skopeo login docker.io

It’ll ask for you username and password, and then you should be good.

Migrate to quay.io

The first example I’m going to show is how to migrate to Quay.io. Quay is the Red Hat container registry, and has some nice to haves built in. Lets go!

Now you need to log into Quay.io here, run the following command:

skopeo login quay.io

Now that you’re logged into both Docker and Quay, you can copy from one to another, I’m not 100% sure on this next statement…but I’m pretty sure you don’t proxy on your machine, you copy from one to another. I have this one container from a stream called the “catapp”, in my following examples that’s what we’ll migrate.

For a sanity check, I’ll verify that skopeo can see the Docker Hub container, I’ll use the inspect command here:

skopeo inspect docker://jjasghar/catapp:latest

Notice the username of jjasghar, like most Cloud Native apps now-a-days it assumes you’re talking to the Docker Hub.

Now that I can see that the container is there, I’ll use the following to copy from Docker Hub to Quay.io:

Note: make sure you have the tag!

skopeo copy docker://jjasghar/catapp:latest docker://quay.io/jjasghar/catapp:latest

Notice how for quay, you need to add the quay.io but for docker you don’t. I realized I’ve already said this but it caught me a couple times.

With that you should see the copy starting to happen, when it’s complete, open up the new registry repository on https://quay.io and you’ll notice it’s set to private by default. You’ll need to go into the settings (I haven’t figured out how to do it programmatic-ly) and flip it to “public.” You should be good now!

Migrate to GitHub Container Registry

Copying over to GitHub’s container registry is a little more involved, but not to bad. You’ll have to create a Personal Access Token aka PAT to start. This will be your “password.” Go ahead and log in via the following command:

skopeo login ghrc.io
username: <github-username>
password: <github-PAT>

After that, it’s just like copying over to quay, just pointing to a different URL, to complete our example:

skopeo copy docker://jjasghar/catapp:latest docker://ghcr.io/jjasghar/catapp/catapp:latest

And with that you should be able to go here (where jjasgahr is your username) and you should see your container in just a couple seconds.