Pull Image From Private Registry

In order to deploy an image into Kubernetes, the image must be available in a registry. I’m very much in the learning & experimenting phase of my Kubernetes journey, and I find myself using Docker Hub private registries for a lot of things. After using docker login I can docker push & docker pull images from a private registry just by naming them correctly with my Docker ID e.g. <my-docker-id>/some-image. However, kubectl doesn’t automatically inherit this knowledge and access, so what must be done to enable deployment of a locally-developed image into a locally-runing cluster? Let’s take a look!

The first thing we need to do is authenticate to the registry, which we can do using docker login. This will prompt for credentials and store an authorization token in ~/.docker/config.json. The lines below demonstrate how to do this and view the result.

docker login
cat ~/.docker/config.json

In order to make the authentication token accessible to the Kubernetes cluster, we can use Secrets. The following commands can be used to copy the credential from the Docker config.json into a Secret named regcred and inspect the result.

kubectl create secret generic regcred \
    --from-file=.dockerconfigjson=<path/to/.docker/config.json> \
    --type=kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson
kubectl get secret regcred --output=yaml

Next, we’ll create a Deployment that includes our Secret. Create a new file my-app-deployment.yaml with the following contents:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-app-deployment
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: my-app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: my-app
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: my-app
        image: <my-docker-id>/my-app:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
      imagePullSecrets:
      - name: regcred

And we’ll need to expose the deployment with a Service, so create another file my-app-service.yaml with this for its contents:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-app-svc
  labels:
    app: my-app
spec:
  type: NodePort
  ports:
  - port: 80
    nodePort: 30080
  selector:
    app: my-app

Now we use these files to create the Deployment and Service in Kubernetes:

kubectl create -f my-app-deployment.yaml
kubectl create -f my-app-service.yaml

That should do the trick. You can inspect the Deployment and Service using kubectl get pods and kubectl describe service my-app-service respectively. Assuming everything deployed correctly, you should be able to access your app at http://cluster-host-ip:30080.

Author: Adam Prescott

I'm enthusiastic and passionate about creating intuitive, great-looking software. I strive to find the simplest solutions to complex problems, and I embrace agile principles and test-driven development. View all posts by Adam Prescott