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

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726 points psviderski | 1 comments | 18 Jun 25 23:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.249s | 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
nine_k ◴[19 Jun 25 00:04 UTC] No.44314310[source]▶
Nice. And the `pussh` command definitely deserves the distinction of one of the most elegant puns: easy to remember, self-explanatory, and just one letter away from its sister standard command.
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gchamonlive ◴[19 Jun 25 01:59 UTC] No.44314789[source]▶
It's fine, but it wouldn't hurt to have a more formal alias like `docker push-over-ssh`.

EDIT: why I think it's important because on automations that are developed collaboratively, "pussh" could be seen as a typo by someone unfamiliar with the feature and cause unnecessary confusion, whereas "push-over-ssh" is clearly deliberate. Think of them maybe as short-hand/full flags.

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1. psviderski ◴[19 Jun 25 04:01 UTC] No.44315319[source]▶
That's a valid concern. You can very easily give it whatever name you like. Docker looks for `docker-COMAND` executables in ~/.docker/cli-plugins directory making COMMAND a `docker` subcommand.

Rename the file to whatever you like, e.g. to get `docker pushoverssh`:

  mv ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-pussh ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-pushoverssh
Note that Docker doesn't allow dashes in plugin commands.