Container Registry

    OKD provides an integrated container image registry called OpenShift Container Registry (OCR) that adds the ability to automatically provision new image repositories on demand. This provides users with a built-in location for their application builds to push the resulting images.

    Whenever a new image is pushed to OCR, the registry notifies OKD about the new image, passing along all the information about it, such as the namespace, name, and image metadata. Different pieces of OKD react to new images, creating new builds and deployments.

    OCR can also be deployed as a stand-alone component that acts solely as a container image registry, without the build and deployment integration. See for details.

    OKD can create containers using images from third party registries, but it is unlikely that these registries offer the same image notification support as the integrated OKD registry. In this situation OKD will fetch tags from the remote registry upon imagestream creation. Refreshing the fetched tags is as simple as running . When new images are detected, the previously-described build and deployment reactions occur.

    OKD can communicate with registries to access private image repositories using credentials supplied by the user. This allows OKD to push and pull images to and from private repositories. The Authentication topic has more information.

    If you need an enterprise-quality container image registry, Red Hat Quay is available both as a hosted service and as software you can install in your own data center or cloud environment. Advanced registry features in Red Hat Quay include geo-replication, image scanning, and the ability to roll back images.

    You can access your Red Hat Quay registry from OKD like any remote container image registry. To learn how to set up credentials to access Red Hat Quay as a secured registry, refer to .

    All container images available through the Red Hat Container Catalog are hosted on an image registry, registry.access.redhat.com. With OKD 3.11 Red Hat Container Catalog moved from registry.access.redhat.com to .

    The new registry, registry.redhat.io, requires authentication for access to images and hosted content on OKD. Following the move to the new registry, the existing registry will be available for a period of time.

    The new registry uses standard OAuth mechanisms for authentication, with the following methods:

    • Authentication token. Tokens, which are generated by administrators, are service accounts that give systems the ability to authenticate against the container image registry. Service accounts are not affected by changes in user accounts, so the token authentication method is reliable and resilient. This is the only supported authentication option for production clusters.

    You can use docker login with your credentials, either username and password or authentication token, to access content on the new registry.

    All image streams point to the new registry. Because the new registry requires authentication for access, there is a new secret in the OpenShift namespace called imagestreamsecret.

    You must place your credentials in two places:

    • OpenShift namespace. Your credentials must exist in the OpenShift namespace so that the image streams in the OpenShift namespace can import.

    • Your host. Your credentials must exist on your host because Kubernetes uses the credentials from your host when it goes to pull images.

    To access the new registry: