Create, Host and Share Docker Images with GitHub Packages

After the rise of cloud, and rise of microservices approaches, modular, plug-and-play and containerized applications are getting more attention.

So, literally hundreds of thousands software engineers are working on projects that built with multiple containerized pieces, all around the world.

If you're using GitHub and wanted a place to store and serve Docker Images for your project, you can easily go and use GitHub Packages, it's free ^(*) and super easy to use 🥳

You can have package registries for your;

Docker Images
npm packages
Maven packages
Gradle packages
NuGet packages
Ruby Gems

^(*): Actually, it's not free (🤦‍♂️) if you want to store more than 500MBs

Plan	Storage
Free	500 MB
Pro	2 GB
Team	2 GB
Enterprise	50 GB
Additional Storage	$0.25 per GB

In this post you can find a guideline to publish, serve and pull a Docker Image to GitHub Packages.

Creating the repo and Dockerfile

Let's create a repo on GitHub first;

After creating the repo, clone it and open it with your favorite editor (mine is Visual Studio Code 😎)

git clone https://github.com/polatengin/copenhagen.git

code copenhagen/

Now we need to create a Dockerfile and build the image we need in the project. (Example Dockerfile can be found on Copenhagen repo, Dockerfile)

FROM ubuntu:latest

LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source=https://github.com/polatengin/copenhagen

Logging in to GitHub Container Registry (a.k.a. GitHub Packages)

Navigate to Personal Access Tokens under GitHub Account Settings, and create a new one, just like below;

* Don't forget to set write:packages permission

It'll display the PAT, copy it to the clipboard.

Run the following command to login via docker cli;

echo ${GITHUB_PAT} | docker login ghcr.io -u ${GITHUB_USERNAME} --password-stdin

* Don't forget to set your username and PAT to the GITHUB_USERNAME and GITHUB_PAT variables

Building and Pushing Docker Image to GitHub Container Registry (a.k.a. GitHub Packages)

It's time to build, tag and push the Docker Image to the GitHub Container Registry (a.k.a. GitHub Packages);

docker build -t copenhagen .

docker tag copenhagen ghcr.io/polatengin/copenhagen:latest

docker push ghcr.io/polatengin/copenhagen:latest

After the Docker Image has been pushed, we can consume it in our projects;

We can see the packages in out GitHub Account, by navigating to the Packages tab (like, https://github.com/polatengin?tab=packages)

Using images from GitHub Container Registry (a.k.a. GitHub Packages)

After login to GitHub Container Registry, we can easily pull and consume images;

echo ${GITHUB_PAT} | docker login ghcr.io -u ${GITHUB_USERNAME} --password-stdin

docker run -d -it ghcr.io/polatengin/copenhagen:latest