artifactory as docker registry

Question

I tried to set up artifactory as docker registry as shown in this video: http://www.jfrog.com/video/artifactory-docker-integration/

However, I don't have SSL installed in artifactory so I'm using the --insecure-registry flag. (as shown in error in docker build publish plugin and Remote access to a private docker-registry)

Anyway, I don't know how to figure out the artifactory as docker registry url so I can do this: curl -k -uusername:password "http://sdpvvrwm812.ib.tor.company.com:8081/artifactory/api/docker/docker-images"

This page, http://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Docker+Repositories, shows at the bottom that something called a reverse proxy might be needed? Is this true and if so how do I install such a thing?

Answer 1

The reason behind requiring a reverse proxy in front of Artifactory is related to a Docker client limitation - you cannot use a context path when providing the registry path, e.g sdpvvrwm812.ib.tor.company.com:8081/artifactory/api/docker/docker-images is not valid.
The Docker client assumes you are working with one big registry for all images, while Artifactory allows you to manage multiple registries (repositories) on the same server.

To overcome this issue you should setup a reverse proxy which will allow the Docker client to send requests to the root context and forward those requests to the correct repository path in Artifactory. For example, forwarding requests from sdpvvrwm812.ib.tor.company.com:8888/ to sdpvvrwm812.ib.tor.company.com:8081/artifactory/api/docker/docker-images

The Artifactory documentation contains configuration examples for NginX, Apache and HAProxy.
Notice that there are different configurations for Docker registry API v1 and v2.

After setting up the reverse proxy, the Docker client should use the proxy in order to access Artifactory.

If you are using the --insecure-registry flag there is no need to configure an SSL certificate. With older versions of Docker, before this flag was introduced (Docker 1.3.2) it was a mandatory requirement.