Container Registry Proxy

📝 Table of Contents

• About
• Getting Started
• Deployment
• Usage
• Running the Tests
• Contributors

🧐 About

The Container Registry Proxy is a small proxy for communicating with a container registry. This proxy supports plugins, these plugins implement a simple typed interface, which allows them to let the proxy modify requests in-transit.

Here's a small demo on how to use the proxy together with the build in Semantic Chaos-plugin. This plugin intercepts requests to resolve a tag to a specific container, and replaces this tag with a random tag which is within scope of the semantic versioning. In this case, the user requested tag 4, the proxy then retrieves all tags which match 4.x.x and returns one at-random to the user.

🏁 Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

You need to have Yarn installed to use this repository.

Installing

First we need to install all dependencies, run:

yarn install

Running Locally

To start the development environment using either of the following commands:

# Without file watching
yarn start

# With file watching
yarn dev

Running in Kubernetes using DevSpace

Build the application, the --watch flag is optional and enables automatic hotreloading:

yarn build --watch

Then to configure and launch DevSpace run:

# Configure DevSpace to the desired namespace
devspace use namespace container-registry-proxy

# Deploy a development version onto K8s
devspace dev

🚀 Deployment

Automatic

Currently, the only supported method of automatically deploying this application is by using Heroku.

When deploying using Heroku, it is recommended to configure the application using environment variables. Make sure to redeploy the application after changing the environment variables, as to put them into effect.

Manual

We automatically build and deploy all releases to:

• NPM
• Docker Hub

NPM

Install the application locally:

# Install globally in NPM
npm install -g container-registry-proxy

# Install globally in Yarn
yarn global add container-registry-proxy

Start the proxy:

# Full command
container-registry-proxy --help

# A short name is also available
crp --help

Docker

docker run --rm -it -p 8080:8080 --name crp addono/container-registry-proxy --help

🎈 Usage

The default configuration of the proxy can be overwritten during startup by adding flags or environment variables:

$ container-registry-proxy start --help
Usage: container-registry-proxy start [options]

Starts the proxy server

Options:
  --plugin <name>        Adds a plugin by name, can be supplied multiple times. Can also be set as a comma separated list using the PLUGINS environment variable. (default: [])
  --customPlugin <path>  Adds a custom plugin by path Can also be set as a comma separated list using the CUSTOM_PLUGINS environment variable. (default: [])
  --port <port>          The port to launch the service on. Can also be set using the PORT environment variable (default: "8080")
  --registry <hostname>  The host to forward requests to. Can also be set using the REGISTRY environment variable. (default: "registry.hub.docker.com")
  --http                 Fall back to using HTTP instead of HTTPS. Can also be set by setting the HTTP environment variable to "true". (default: false)
  -h, --help             display help for command

For example, these two methods of starting the proxy are equivalent:

# Using arguments
container-registry-proxy --plugin semanticChaos --port 8000

# Using environment variables
PLUGINS=semanticChaos PORT=8000 container-registry-proxy

Once you have a proxy running, you can use it like this:

# For https://hub.docker.com/r/addono/container-registry-proxy
docker pull localhost:8080/addono/container-registry-proxy

# For https://hub.docker.com/_/nginx
docker pull localhost:8080/library/nginx

Note: If your Docker daemon is running in a VM, which would be the case if you're using Docker Toolbox on Mac, then pulling directly from localhost will not work.

One workaround is using ngrok to have a publicly available domain name to connect to. As an added benefit, this also gives HTTPS support out of the box and makes it accessible also from other machines:

# Note the ngrok domain assigned to you
ngrok http 8080

# Make sure to replace the ngrok domain name
docker pull 5d354ae8.ngrok.io/library/nginx

Custom Plugins

Custom plugins are simple JavaScript modules implementing the Plugin interface, which are loaded in at runtime. An example of a custom plugin can be found here Assuming we have the container-regsitry-proxy installed locally and a plugin in ./dist/plugin.js, then we can load this plugin using:

container-registry-proxy --customPlugin ./dist/plugin.js

Creating Custom Plugins

To create your own custom plugin, it is recommended to write it in TypeScript and compile it to JavaScript. It's easiest to fork or copy the example plugin and follow the instructions there, as it already incorporates various best-practices to ease development.

Alternatively, a minimal approach on creating a plugin would follow the following steps:

yarn global add container-registry-proxy typescript

Create a file plugin.ts with the following content:

import { Request, Plugin } from 'container-registry-proxy/dist/plugins'

const plugin: Plugin = {
  name: 'Logger',
  description: 'Merely logs all requests',
  requestPipe: async (request: Request) => {
    console.log('LOGGER:', request)
    return request
  },
}

export default plugin

Now compile it into JavaScript:

tsc plugin.ts

Now, the plugin can be used by running:

container-registry-proxy --customPlugin plugin.js

🔧 Running the Tests

After setting up the development environment, tests can be invoked using:

yarn test

✨ Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!