Using Private Registry with OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes

Last updated 28th February, 2023.

In this tutorial we are going to guide you in using images from OVHcloud Managed Private Registry service on OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes clusters.

Before you begin

This tutorial presupposes that you already have a working OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster, and some basic knowledge of how to operate it. If you want to know more on those topics, please look at the deploying a Hello World application documentation.

You also need to have a working OVHcloud Managed Private Registry and have followed the guides on creating a private registry, connecting to the UI, managing users and projects and creating and using private images.

We will specifically suppose you have followed the last one and you have a hello-ovh image on your private registry.

Create Kubernetes Secret

Kubernetes needs to have access to the private registry to pull images from it, so you need to store the private registry credentials in a Kubernetes Secret. There are 2 ways to create the registry credentials secret. Chose the solution you prefer.

1. Create a Secret based on existing Docker credentials

Log in to your OVHcloud Managed Private Registry

In order to pull a private image from your private registry, you must authenticate with it using docker login.

docker login [YOUR_PRIVATE_REGISTRY_URL]

For my private registry:

  $ docker login 8093ff7x.gra5.container-registry.ovh.net
  Username: private-user
  Password: 
  Login Succeeded

The login process creates or updates a config.json file that holds an authorization token.

View the config.json file:

cat ~/.docker/config.json

Creating the Secret

Let's create a Secret of docker-registry type.

You will use this Secret to authenticate with your private registry to pull a private image.

If you already ran docker login, you can copy that credential into Kubernetes:

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

For my private registry:

$ kubectl create secret generic regcred \
  --from-file=.dockerconfigjson=/Users/avache/.docker/config.json \
  --type=kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson

  secret/regcred created

You can check the secret has been correctly deployed in your Kubernetes cluster:

$ kubectl get secret regcred -o jsonpath="{.data.\.dockerconfigjson}"

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2. Create a Secret by providing credentials on the command line

Let's create a Secret of docker-registry type.

You will use this Secret to authenticate with your private registry to pull a private image:

kubectl create secret docker-registry regcred \
    --docker-server=<your-registry-server> \
    --docker-username=<your-username> \
    --docker-password=<your-password>

For my private registry:

$ kubectl create secret docker-registry regcred \
    --docker-server=cx6ds30d.gra7.container-registry.ovh.net \
    --docker-username=private-user \
    --docker-password=PrivateUser1

  secret/regcred created

You can check the secret has been correctly deployed in your Kubernetes cluster:

$ kubectl get secret regcred -o jsonpath="{.data.\.dockerconfigjson}"

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Deploying an image

The first step to deploy a Docker image in a Kubernetes cluster is to write a YAML manifest. Let's call it hello-ovh.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
    name: hello-ovh
    labels:
        app: hello-ovh
spec:
    type: LoadBalancer
    ports:
        - port: 80
          targetPort: 80
          protocol: TCP
          name: http
    selector:
        app: hello-ovh
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
    name: hello-ovh-deployment
    labels:
        app: hello-ovh
spec:
    replicas: 1
    selector:
        matchLabels:
            app: hello-ovh
    template:
        metadata:
            labels:
                app: hello-ovh
        spec:
            containers:
                - name: hello-ovh
                  image: [YOUR_PRIVATE_REGISTRY_URL]/[YOUR_PROJECT]/hello-ovh:1.0.0
                  ports:
                      - containerPort: 80
            imagePullSecrets:
                - name: regcred

And then we can apply the file:

kubectl apply -f hello-ovh.yaml

After applying the YAML file, a new hello-world service and the corresponding hello-world-deployment deployment are created:

$ kubectl apply -f hello-ovh.yaml

service/hello-ovh created
deployment.apps/hello-ovh-deployment created

$ kubectl get po -l app=hello-ovh
NAME                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hello-ovh-deployment-6df76cb7b8-vbk2b   1/1     Running   0          66s

Our Pod is correctly running, so Kubernetes has pulled the image from your private registry with success.

Go further

To have an overview of OVHcloud Managed Private Registry service, you can go to the OVHcloud Managed Private Registry site.

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.

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