Chapter 3. Setting up the Registry

OpenShift Container Platform can build container images from your source code, deploy them, and manage their lifecycle. To enable this, OpenShift Container Platform provides an internal, integrated Docker registry that can be deployed in your OpenShift Container Platform environment to locally manage images.

During an initial installation of a full OpenShift Container Platform cluster, it is likely that the registry was deployed automatically during the installation process. If it was not, or if you want to further customize the configuration of your registry, see Deploying a Registry on Existing Clusters.

While it can be deployed to run as an integrated part of your full OpenShift Container Platform cluster, the OpenShift Container Platform registry can alternatively be installed separately as a stand-alone container image registry.

To install a stand-alone registry, follow Installing a Stand-alone Registry. This installation path deploys an all-in-one cluster running a registry and specialized web console.

If the integrated registry was not previously deployed automatically during the initial installation of your OpenShift Container Platform cluster, or if it is no longer running successfully and you need to redeploy it on your existing cluster, see the following sections for options on deploying a new registry.

To deploy the integrated Docker registry, use the oc adm registry command as a user with cluster administrator privileges. For example:

$ oc adm registry --config=/etc/origin/master/admin.kubeconfig \1
    --service-account=registry \2
    --images='registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-${component}:${version}' 3

This creates a service and a deployment configuration, both called docker-registry. Once deployed successfully, a pod is created with a name similar to docker-registry-1-cpty9.

To see a full list of options that you can specify when creating the registry:

$ oc adm registry --help

The value for --fs-group must be permitted by the SCC used by the registry (typically, the restricted SCC).

Use the oc adm registry command to deploy the registry as a DaemonSet with the --daemonset option.

Daemonsets ensure that when nodes are created, they contain copies of a specified pod. When the nodes are removed, the pods are garbage collected.

For more information on DaemonSets, see Using Daemonsets.

By default, the registry is created with no settings for compute resource requests or limits. For production, it is highly recommended that the deployment configuration for the registry be updated to set resource requests and limits for the registry pod. Otherwise, the registry pod will be considered a BestEffort pod.

See Compute Resources for more information on configuring requests and limits.

The registry stores container images and metadata. If you simply deploy a pod with the registry, it uses an ephemeral volume that is destroyed if the pod exits. Any images anyone has built or pushed into the registry would disappear.

This section lists the supported registry storage drivers.

The following list includes storage drivers that need to be configured in the registry’s configuration file:

General registry storage configuration options are supported.

The following storage options need to be configured through the filesystem driver:

$ oc volume deploymentconfigs/docker-registry --add --name=registry-storage -t pvc \
     --claim-name=<pvc_name> --overwrite

storage:
  cache:
    layerinfo: inmemory
  delete:
    enabled: true
  s3:
    accesskey: awsaccesskey 1
    secretkey: awssecretkey 2
    region: us-west-1
    regionendpoint: http://myobjects.local
    bucket: bucketname
    encrypt: true
    keyid: mykeyid
    secure: true
    v4auth: false
    chunksize: 5242880
    rootdirectory: /s3/object/name/prefix

$ oc adm registry --service-account=registry \
    --config=/etc/origin/master/admin.kubeconfig \
    --images='registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-${component}:${version}' \
    --mount-host=<path>

$ sudo chown 1001:root <path>

OpenShift Container Platform provides a web-based interface to the integrated registry. This registry console is an optional component for browsing and managing images. It is deployed as a stateless service running as a pod.

$ oc set env dc registry-console G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=cockpit-ws,cockpit-wrapper

To view the logs for the Docker registry, use the oc logs command with the deployment configuration:

$ oc logs dc/docker-registry
2015-05-01T19:48:36.300593110Z time="2015-05-01T19:48:36Z" level=info msg="version=v2.0.0+unknown"
2015-05-01T19:48:36.303294724Z time="2015-05-01T19:48:36Z" level=info msg="redis not configured" instance.id=9ed6c43d-23ee-453f-9a4b-031fea646002
2015-05-01T19:48:36.303422845Z time="2015-05-01T19:48:36Z" level=info msg="using inmemory layerinfo cache" instance.id=9ed6c43d-23ee-453f-9a4b-031fea646002
2015-05-01T19:48:36.303433991Z time="2015-05-01T19:48:36Z" level=info msg="Using OpenShift Auth handler"
2015-05-01T19:48:36.303439084Z time="2015-05-01T19:48:36Z" level=info msg="listening on :5000" instance.id=9ed6c43d-23ee-453f-9a4b-031fea646002

Tag and image metadata is stored in OpenShift Container Platform, but the registry stores layer and signature data in a volume that is mounted into the registry container at /registry. As oc exec does not work on privileged containers, to view a registry’s contents you must manually SSH into the node housing the registry pod’s container, then run docker exec on the container itself:

For advanced usage, you can access the registry directly to invoke docker commands. This allows you to push images to or pull them from the integrated registry directly using operations like docker push or docker pull. To do so, you must be logged in to the registry using the docker login command. The operations you can perform depend on your user permissions, as described in the following sections.

The OpenShift Container Registry provides an endpoint for Prometheus metrics. Prometheus is a stand-alone, open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

The metrics are exposed at the /extensions/v2/metrics path of the registry endpoint. However, this route must first be enabled; see Extended Registry Configuration for instructions.

The following is a simple example of a metrics query:

$ curl -s -u <user>:<secret> \ 1
    http://172.30.30.30:5000/extensions/v2/metrics | grep openshift | head -n 10

# HELP openshift_build_info A metric with a constant '1' value labeled by major, minor, git commit & git version from which OpenShift was built.
# TYPE openshift_build_info gauge
openshift_build_info{gitCommit="67275e1",gitVersion="v3.6.0-alpha.1+67275e1-803",major="3",minor="6+"} 1
# HELP openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds Request latency summary in microseconds for each operation
# TYPE openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds summary
openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds{name="test/origin-pod",operation="blobstore.create",quantile="0.5"} 0
openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds{name="test/origin-pod",operation="blobstore.create",quantile="0.9"} 0
openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds{name="test/origin-pod",operation="blobstore.create",quantile="0.99"} 0
openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds_sum{name="test/origin-pod",operation="blobstore.create"} 0
openshift_registry_request_duration_seconds_count{name="test/origin-pod",operation="blobstore.create"} 5

See the upstream Prometheus documentation for more advanced queries and recommended visualizers.

By default, the OpenShift Container Registry is secured during cluster installation so that it serves traffic via TLS. A passthrough route is also created by default to expose the service externally.

If for any reason your registry has not been secured or exposed, see the following sections for steps on how to manually do so.

To manually secure the registry to serve traffic via TLS:

Instead of logging in to the OpenShift Container Registry from within the OpenShift Container Platform cluster, you can gain external access to it by first securing the registry and then exposing it with a route. This allows you to log in to the registry from outside the cluster using the route address, and to tag and push images using the route host.

Instead of securing the registry in order to expose the registry, you can simply expose a non-secure registry for non-production OpenShift Container Platform environments. This allows you to have an external route to the registry without using SSL certificates.

To expose a non-secure registry:

When logging in to the non-secured and exposed registry, make sure you specify the registry in the docker login command. For example:

# docker login -e user@company.com \
    -u f83j5h6 \
    -p Ju1PeM47R0B92Lk3AZp-bWJSck2F7aGCiZ66aFGZrs2 \
    <host>

OpenShift Container Platform refers to the integrated registry by its service IP address, so if you decide to delete and recreate the docker-registry service, you can ensure a completely transparent transition by arranging to re-use the old IP address in the new service. If a new IP address cannot be avoided, you can minimize cluster disruption by rebooting only the masters.

You can specify a whitelist of docker registries, allowing you to curate a set of images and templates that are available for download by OpenShift Container Platform users. This curated set can be placed in one or more docker registries, and then added to the whitelist. When using a whitelist, only the specified registries are accessible within OpenShift Container Platform, and all other registries are denied access by default.

To configure a whitelist:

Once the whitelist is configured, if a user tries to pull from a docker registry that is not on the whitelist, they will receive an error message stating that this registry is not allowed.

You can configure the hostname and port the registry is known by for both internal and external references. By doing this, image streams will provide hostname based push and pull specifications for images, allowing consumers of the images to be isolated from changes to the registry service ip and potentially allowing image streams and their references to be portable between clusters.

To set the hostname used to reference the registry from within the cluster, set the internalRegistryHostname in the imagePolicyConfig section of the master configuration file. The external hostname is controlled by setting the externalRegistryHostname value in the same location.

imagePolicyConfig:
  internalRegistryHostname: docker-registry.default.svc.cluster.local:5000
  externalRegistryHostname: docker-registry.mycompany.com

You can override the integrated registry’s default configuration, found by default at /config.yml in a running registry’s container, with your own custom configuration.

To enable management of the registry configuration file directly and deploy an updated configuration using a ConfigMap:

This may be performed as an iterative process to achieve the desired configuration. For example, during troubleshooting, the configuration may be temporarily updated to put it in debug mode.

To update an existing configuration:

There are many configuration options available in the upstream docker distribution library. Not all configuration options are supported or enabled. Use this section as a reference when overriding the registry configuration.

log:
  level: debug
  formatter: text
  fields:
    service: registry
    environment: staging

storage:
  delete:
    enabled: true 1
  redirect:
    disable: false
  cache:
    blobdescriptor: inmemory
  maintenance:
    uploadpurging:
      enabled: true
      age: 168h
      interval: 24h
      dryrun: false
    readonly:
      enabled: false

auth:
  openshift:
    realm: openshift

middleware:
  registry:
    - name: openshift 1
  repository:
    - name: openshift 2
      options:
        acceptschema2: true 3
        pullthrough: true 4
        mirrorpullthrough: true 5
        enforcequota: false 6
        projectcachettl: 1m 7
        blobrepositorycachettl: 10m 8
  storage:
    - name: openshift 9

version: 0.1
log:
  level: debug
http:
  addr: :5000
storage:
  cache:
    blobdescriptor: inmemory
  delete:
    enabled: true
  s3: 1
    accesskey: BJKMSZBRESWJQXRWMAEQ
    secretkey: 5ah5I91SNXbeoUXXDasFtadRqOdy62JzlnOW1goS
    region: us-east-1
    bucket: docker.myregistry.com
auth:
  openshift:
    realm: openshift
middleware:
  registry:
    - name: openshift
  repository:
    - name: openshift
  storage:
    - name: cloudfront 2
      options:
        baseurl: https://jrpbyn0k5k88bi.cloudfront.net/ 3
        privatekey: /etc/docker/cloudfront-ABCEDFGHIJKLMNOPQRST.pem 4
        keypairid: ABCEDFGHIJKLMNOPQRST 5
    - name: openshift

middleware:
  repository:
    - name: openshift
      options:
        acceptschema2: true 1
        pullthrough: true 2
        mirrorpullthrough: true 3
        enforcequota: false 4
        projectcachettl: 1m 5
        blobrepositorycachettl: 10m 6

$ oc get imagestreamtag/${IS}:${TAG} -o jsonpath='{ .image.dockerImageLayers[*].name }' | \
  xargs -n1 -I {} curl -H "Range: bytes=0-1" -u user:${TOKEN} \
  http://${REGISTRY_IP}:${PORT}/v2/default/mysql/blobs/{}

openshift:
  version: 1.0 1
  server:
    addr: docker-registry.default.svc 2
  metrics:
    enabled: false 3
    secret: <secret> 4
  requests:
    read:
      maxrunning: 10 5
      maxinqueue: 10 6
      maxwaitinqueue 2m 7
    write:
      maxrunning: 10 8
      maxinqueue: 10 9
      maxwaitinqueue 2m 10

http:
  addr: :5000
  tls:
    certificate: /etc/secrets/registry.crt
    key: /etc/secrets/registry.key

notifications:
  endpoints:
    - name: registry
      disabled: false
      url: https://url:port/path
      headers:
        Accept:
          - text/plain
      timeout: 500
      threshold: 5
      backoff: 1000

The following are the known issues when deploying or using the integrated registry.

When using a scaled registry with a shared NFS volume, you may see one of the following errors during the push of an image:

These errors are returned by an internal registry service when Docker attempts to push the image. Its cause originates in the synchronization of file attributes across nodes. Factors such as NFS client side caching, network latency, and layer size can all contribute to potential errors that might occur when pushing an image using the default round-robin load balancing configuration.

You can perform the following steps to minimize the probability of such a failure:

This error occurs when the pulled image is pushed to an image stream different from the one it is being pulled from. This is caused by re-tagging a built image into an arbitrary image stream:

$ oc tag srcimagestream:latest anyproject/pullimagestream:latest

internal.registry.url:5000/anyproject/pullimagestream:latest

During a manual Docker pull, this will produce a similar error:

Error: image anyproject/pullimagestream:latest not found

To prevent this, avoid the tagging of internally managed images completely, or re-push the built image to the desired namespace manually.

There are problems reported happening when the registry runs on S3 storage back-end. Pushing to a Docker registry occasionally fails with the following error:

Received unexpected HTTP status: 500 Internal Server Error

To debug this, you need to view the registry logs. In there, look for similar error messages occurring at the time of the failed push:

time="2016-03-30T15:01:21.22287816-04:00" level=error msg="unknown error completing upload: driver.Error{DriverName:\"s3\", Enclosed:(*url.Error)(0xc20901cea0)}" http.request.method=PUT
...
time="2016-03-30T15:01:21.493067808-04:00" level=error msg="response completed with error" err.code=UNKNOWN err.detail="s3: Put https://s3.amazonaws.com/oso-tsi-docker/registry/docker/registry/v2/blobs/sha256/ab/abe5af443833d60cf672e2ac57589410dddec060ed725d3e676f1865af63d2e2/data: EOF" err.message="unknown error" http.request.method=PUT
...
time="2016-04-02T07:01:46.056520049-04:00" level=error msg="error putting into main store: s3: The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method." http.request.method=PUT
atest

If you see such errors, contact your Amazon S3 support. There may be a problem in your region or with your particular bucket.

If you encounter the following error when pruning images:

BLOB sha256:49638d540b2b62f3b01c388e9d8134c55493b1fa659ed84e97cb59b87a6b8e6c error deleting blob

And your registry log contains the following information:

error deleting blob \"sha256:49638d540b2b62f3b01c388e9d8134c55493b1fa659ed84e97cb59b87a6b8e6c\": operation unsupported

It means that your custom configuration file lacks mandatory entries in the storage section, namely storage:delete:enabled set to true. Add them, re-deploy the registry, and repeat your image pruning operation.