Now publishing images to GitHub Container Registry + Registry migration FAQ

julian

Hello all,

Following our announcement earlier this month regarding our potential move away from Docker, there have been some updates.

Firstly, Docker is no longer sunsetting their "Free Team Plan", which the NodeBB org is currently on.

While this is good news from an archival and data integrity standpoint (in that the images contained in the nodebb/docker repository on Docker Hub will remain unchanged/undeleted), the original intent behind the plan changes continues to give us pause.

To that end, we have continued with our original plan of switching over to the GitHub Container Registry.

Our community maintainer for the NodeBB Dockerfile — @oplik0 — has written up a helpful FAQ for those interested in next steps.

NodeBB Docker Registry Migration FAQ

What is happening?

NodeBB is moving from Docker Hub to GitHub Container Registry as the official registry for NodeBB docker images. As such, the official container image will move from nodebb/docker to ghcr.io/NodeBB/NodeBB (case insensitive).

The latest tags published to Docker Hub also include a warning about the migration in the readme and on container startup, with a link to this topic.

What do I need to do?

If you are currently using NodeBB via docker (or via any other container-based system, e.g. k8s) by pulling the container, you will need to change the tag used to refer to the NodeBB docker image from nodebb/docker to ghcr.io/NodeBB/NodeBB in order to continue receiving updates.

If you had cloned the NodeBB repository and used the provided docker compose file, your usage will NOT be affected as the container was built from a local source instead of being pulled from the registry.

Deployments of existing versions will also not break — the Docker Hub image will simply not receive any more updates.

Why are you doing this?

On March 14th, Docker announced that they will be sunsetting their Free Team plan, giving users a month to migrate to paid plans or risk losing access to their accounts and having their data deleted on unspecified timeline. There is no way to downgrade the account to a free personal plan, leaving payment and a strict Open Source program (for which NodeBB doesn't qualify) as the only ways forward.

While Docker has since reversed this decision, as docker images, and especially the Docker Hub hosted image, are not the primary ways NodeBB is distributed, and are mostly supported by our community, we have less tolerance to related risks. Docker has demonstrated a pattern of removing features in ways that are disrupting to user workflows (e.g. the past move to require subscriptions for commercial use of Docker Desktop) and this event has pushed us to reconsider relying on their service.

In addition to decreasing the risk of future disruptions to our container image distribution, GitHub Container Registry has some more direct benefits related to its close integration with GitHub, including a simplified CI pipeline that no longer requires any repository secrets - thanks to which contributors will no longer see docker pipeline failures on their forks due to lack of docker credentials. Additionally, the GitHub registry has much more generous rate limits for free and anonymous accounts than Docker Hub.

Thank you @oplik0!

Please comment below if you have any questions or concerns.

Gliding9426

@julian said in Now publishing images to GitHub Container Registry + Registry migration FAQ:

ghcr.io/NodeBB/NodeBB (case insensitive)

thanks, just changed the repository, but i got error from docker compose, it told me it must be all lowercase (not case insensitive)