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

(github.com)
726 points psviderski | 1 comments | 18 Jun 25 23:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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
jlhawn ◴[18 Jun 25 23:52 UTC] No.44314256[source]▶
A quick and dirty version:

    docker -H host1 image save IMAGE | docker -H host2 image load
note: this isn't efficient at all (no compression or layer caching)!
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alisonatwork ◴[19 Jun 25 02:41 UTC] No.44314973[source]▶
On podman this is built in as native command podman-image-scp[0], which perhaps could be more efficient with SSH compression.

[0] https://docs.podman.io/en/stable/markdown/podman-image-scp.1...

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travisgriggs ◴[19 Jun 25 04:40 UTC] No.44315491[source]▶
So with Podman, this exists already, but for docker, this has to be created by the community.

I am a bystander to these technologies. I’ve built and debug’ed the rare image, and I use docker desktop on my Mac to isolate db images.

When I see things like these, I’m always curious why docker, which seems so much more beaurecratic/convoluted, prevails over podman. I totally admit this is a naive impression.

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1. djfivyvusn ◴[19 Jun 25 09:13 UTC] No.44316828[source]▶
Something that took me 20 years to learn: Never underestimate the value of a slick gui.