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Show HN: Unregistry – “docker push” directly to servers without a registry

(github.com)
726 points psviderski | 2 comments | 18 Jun 25 23:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.448s | source

I got tired of the push-to-registry/pull-from-registry dance every time I needed to deploy a Docker image.

In certain cases, using a full-fledged external (or even local) registry is annoying overhead. And if you think about it, there's already a form of registry present on any of your Docker-enabled hosts — the Docker's own image storage.

So I built Unregistry [1] that exposes Docker's (containerd) image storage through a standard registry API. It adds a `docker pussh` command that pushes images directly to remote Docker daemons over SSH. It transfers only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.

  docker pussh myapp:latest user@server
Under the hood, it starts a temporary unregistry container on the remote host, pushes to it through an SSH tunnel, and cleans up when done.

I've built it as a byproduct while working on Uncloud [2], a tool for deploying containers across a network of Docker hosts, and figured it'd be useful as a standalone project.

Would love to hear your thoughts and use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry

[2]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud

Show context
dzonga ◴[18 Jun 25 23:59 UTC] No.44314288[source]▶
this is nice, hopefully DHH and the folks working on Kamal adopt this.

the whole reason I didn't end up using kamal was the 'need' a docker registry thing. when I can easily push a dockerfile / compose to my vps build an image there and restart to deploy via a make command

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1. rudasn ◴[19 Jun 25 00:46 UTC] No.44314483[source]▶
Build the image on the deployment server? Why not build somewhere else once and save time during deployments?

I'm most familiar with on-prem deployments and quickly realised that it's much faster to build once, push to registry (eg github) and docker compose pull during deployments.

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2. christiangenco ◴[19 Jun 25 15:25 UTC] No.44319561[source]▶
I think the idea with unregistry is that you're still building somewhere else once but then instead of pushing everything to a registry once you push your unique layers directly to each server you're deploying.