Is it possible to deploy without a docker registry?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I have a very fast internet connection (> 1Gbit) and the project I work on is very budget sensitive on the hosting side.
I don't have any need or reason to use a docker registry except that I need to get the docker image from my local machine to the remote machine.

After some research, it seems to be trivial to "push" a docker image over ssh:

docker save app:1.0 | gzip | DOCKER_HOST=ssh://user@remotehost docker load

(source)
This has a penalty on having to fully transfer the image, but to me uploading a 1GB image is ~8 seconds.

Is it possible to do something similar with Kamal?
The registry seems to be just a tax to move docker images from my local machine to a remote machine and the funny thing is that the registry is already a remote machine.

[yoelcabo]

Not sure if this is helpful, but another option is installing a docker registry in the machine you are deploying to:
https://distribution.github.io/distribution/

It surely adds some complexity though

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

That is probably what I'm going to do. Is it possible to expand the setup script for Kamal? I could include the registry installation there

[nickhammond]

You should be able to add the registry as an accessory, then boot the registry via Kamal, update your configuration to point to your registry, and then do a deploy.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I see, thank you. I wish there is a way to do it without changing the config afterwards, but I can work around it with an environment variable.
Thank you!

[laptopmutia]

is there any real complexity for doing this?

or just some extra works to setup the distribution?

how is it going for you @Fire-Dragon-DoL have you done this?

I agree with u 1000% that the docker hub cost is really taxing

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I haven't, my existing setup is still working for now

[motdotla]

This would be nice to have. This was my biggest surprise with Kamal. I was expecting its default to be sans-registry.

[nickhammond]

I get it but at the same time once you add a server, you need a registry. It'd be cool though if there was a setting like:

registry:
  local: true

Which would then boot up a container with the docker registry and just point to that.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

That's what I imagined, or alternatively a hook for the "bootstrap" script to run more things.

[motdotla]

Would the docker load command avoid the need for a registry?

1. You can build a docker image to a tar.gz file with docker save your-image:latest | gzip > your-image-latest.tar.gz
2. And load it with docker load < your-image-latest.tar.gz
3. Then run it as usual with docker run

Could Kamal then theoretically push that tar.gz file up to your server on deploy, load it, and then run it?

edit: sorry, this is exactly what you described @Fire-Dragon-DoL. this feels like it should be the default - in the spirit of Kamal removing reliance on external services.

edit2:

Possibly:

1. make use of upload! source
2. add a push_gzip command that runs docker build && docker save | gzip > image.tar.gz and then upload!(image.tar.gz) source
3. add a load_gzip command that runs docker load < image.tar.gz source

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I have been doing that. It is quite slow, since images are usually big

[laptopmutia]

I think kamal should have things like this https://github.com/brthor/docker-push-ssh

[nickhammond]

Just to add to going the route of managing as an accessory with Kamal. The registry container is pretty flexible with how you want to host it and there's a bunch of documentation around it too. Kamal is great at booting up existing container images and managing the lifecycle of those.

https://distribution.github.io/distribution/about/deploying/
https://hub.docker.com/_/registry

You'd want to ensure authentication is in place and preferably it's firewalled appropriately as well, something like this though with the additional ENV options in place for auth.

accessories:
  registry:
    image: registry
    host: server-ip
    port: 5000

[laptopmutia]

can you elaborate more on that?
reading more here run-an-externally-accessible-registry

I need to atleast make TLS to avoid MITM,
the needs to have TLS before the apps even running feels so wrong, if I only use 1 server and without domain

seems there is no simple way to do this currently

to me I think we need to push the image with ssh