Container Registry

OpenShift Container Platform can utilize any server implementing the container image registry API as a source of images, including the Docker Hub, private registries run by third parties, and the integrated OpenShift Container Platform registry.

OpenShift Container Platform provides an integrated container image registry called OpenShift Container Registry (OCR) that adds the ability to automatically provision new image repositories on demand. This provides users with a built-in location for their application builds to push the resulting images.

Whenever a new image is pushed to OCR, the registry notifies OpenShift Container Platform about the new image, passing along all the information about it, such as the namespace, name, and image metadata. Different pieces of OpenShift Container Platform react to new images, creating new builds and deployments.

OCR can also be deployed as a stand-alone component that acts solely as a container image registry, without the build and deployment integration. See Installing a Stand-alone deployment of OpenShift Container Registry for details.

OpenShift Container Platform can create containers using images from third party registries, but it is unlikely that these registries offer the same image notification support as the integrated OpenShift Container Platform registry. In this situation OpenShift Container Platform will fetch tags from the remote registry upon imagestream creation. Refreshing the fetched tags is as simple as running oc import-image <stream>. When new images are detected, the previously-described build and deployment reactions occur.

If you need an enterprise-quality container image registry, Red Hat Quay is available both as a hosted service and as software you can install in your own data center or cloud environment. Advanced registry features in Red Hat Quay include geo-replication, image scanning, and the ability to roll back images.

Visit the Quay.io site to set up your own hosted Quay registry account. After that, follow the Quay Tutorial to log in to the Quay registry and start managing your images. Alternatively, refer to Getting Started with Red Hat Quay for information about setting up your own Red Hat Quay registry.

You can access your Red Hat Quay registry from OpenShift Container Platform like any remote container image registry. To learn how to set up credentials to access Red Hat Quay as a secured registry, refer to Allowing Pods to Reference Images from Other Secured Registries.

All container images available through the Red Hat Container Catalog are hosted on an image registry, registry.access.redhat.com. With OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 Red Hat Container Catalog moved from registry.access.redhat.com to registry.redhat.io.

The new registry, registry.redhat.io, requires authentication for access to images and hosted content on OpenShift Container Platform. Following the move to the new registry, the existing registry will be available for a period of time.

The new registry uses standard OAuth mechanisms for authentication, with the following methods:

You can use docker login with your credentials, either username and password or authentication token, to access content on the new registry.

All image streams point to the new registry. Because the new registry requires authentication for access, there is a new secret in the OpenShift namespace called imagestreamsecret.

You must place your credentials in two places:

To access the new registry: