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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: 0.212s | 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

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jdsleppy ◴[19 Jun 25 11:22 UTC] No.44317574[source]▶
I've been very happy doing this:

DOCKER_HOST=“ssh://user@remotehost” docker-compose up -d

It works with plain docker, too. Another user is getting at the same idea when they mention docker contexts, which is just a different way to set the variable.

Did you know about this approach? In the snippet above, the image will be built on the remote machine and then run. The context (files) are sent over the wire as needed. Subsequent runs will use the remote machine's docker cache. It's slightly different than your approach of building locally, but much simpler.

replies(2): >>44317858 #>>44318663 #
1. ◴[19 Jun 25 13:48 UTC] No.44318663[source]▶