How can I find a Docker image with a specific tag in Docker registry on the Docker command line?

Question

I try to locate one specific tag for a Docker image. How can I do it on the command line? I want to avoid downloading all the images and then removing the unneeded ones.

In the official Ubuntu release, https://registry.hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu/, there are several tags (release for it), while when I search it on the command line,

user@ubuntu:~$ docker search ubuntu | grep ^ubuntu
ubuntu              Official Ubuntu base image                          354
ubuntu-upstart      Upstart is an event-based replacement for ...   7
ubuntufan/ping                                                0
ubuntu-debootstrap                                                   0

Also in the help of command line search https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/search/, no clue how it can work?

Is it possible in the docker search command?

If I use a raw command to search via the Docker registry API, then the information can be fetched:

   $ curl https://registry.hub.docker.com//v1/repositories/ubuntu/tags | python -mjson.tool
   [
    {
        "layer": "ef83896b",
        "name": "latest"
    },
    .....
    {
        "layer": "463ff6be",
        "name": "raring"
    },
    {
        "layer": "195eb90b",
        "name": "saucy"
    },
    {
        "layer": "ef83896b",
        "name": "trusty"
    }
]

Answer 1

When using CoreOS, jq is available to parse JSON data.

So like you were doing before, looking at library/centos:

$ curl -s -S 'https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/centos/tags/' | jq '."results"[]["name"]' |sort
"6"
"6.7"
"centos5"
"centos5.11"
"centos6"
"centos6.6"
"centos6.7"
"centos7.0.1406"
"centos7.1.1503"
"latest"

The cleaner v2 API is available now, and that's what I'm using in the example. I will build a simple script docker_remote_tags:

#!/usr/bin/bash
curl -s -S "https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/$@/tags/" | jq '."results"[]["name"]' |sort

Enables:

$ ./docker_remote_tags library/centos
"6"
"6.7"
"centos5"
"centos5.11"
"centos6"
"centos6.6"
"centos6.7"
"centos7.0.1406"
"centos7.1.1503"
"latest"

Reference:

jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ | apt-get install jq

Answer 2

I didn't like any of the solutions above because A) they required external libraries that I didn't have and didn't want to install. B) I didn't get all the pages.

The Docker API limits you to 100 items per request. This will loop over each "next" item and get them all (for Python it's seven pages; other may be more or less... It depends)

If you really want to spam yourself, remove | cut -d '-' -f 1 from the last line, and you will see absolutely everything.

url=https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/redis/tags/?page_size=100 `# Initial url` ; \
( \
  while [ ! -z $url ]; do `# Keep looping until the variable url is empty` \
    >&2 echo -n "." `# Every iteration of the loop prints out a single dot to show progress as it got through all the pages (this is inline dot)` ; \
    content=$(curl -s $url | python -c 'import sys, json; data = json.load(sys.stdin); print(data.get("next", "") or ""); print("\n".join([x["name"] for x in data["results"]]))') `# Curl the URL and pipe the output to Python. Python will parse the JSON and print the very first line as the next URL (it will leave it blank if there are no more pages) then continue to loop over the results extracting only the name; all will be stored in a variable called content` ; \
    url=$(echo "$content" | head -n 1) `# Let's get the first line of content which contains the next URL for the loop to continue` ; \
    echo "$content" | tail -n +2 `# Print the content without the first line (yes +2 is counter intuitive)` ; \
  done; \
  >&2 echo `# Finally break the line of dots` ; \
) | cut -d '-' -f 1 | sort --version-sort | uniq;

Sample output:

$ url=https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/redis/tags/?page_size=100 `#initial url` ; \
> ( \
>   while [ ! -z $url ]; do `#Keep looping until the variable url is empty` \
>     >&2 echo -n "." `#Every iteration of the loop prints out a single dot to show progress as it got through all the pages (this is inline dot)` ; \
>     content=$(curl -s $url | python -c 'import sys, json; data = json.load(sys.stdin); print(data.get("next", "") or ""); print("\n".join([x["name"] for x in data["results"]]))') `# Curl the URL and pipe the JSON to Python. Python will parse the JSON and print the very first line as the next URL (it will leave it blank if there are no more pages) then continue to loop over the results extracting only the name; all will be store in a variable called content` ; \
>     url=$(echo "$content" | head -n 1) `#Let's get the first line of content which contains the next URL for the loop to continue` ; \
>     echo "$content" | tail -n +2 `#Print the content with out the first line (yes +2 is counter intuitive)` ; \
>   done; \
>   >&2 echo `#Finally break the line of dots` ; \
> ) | cut -d '-' -f 1 | sort --version-sort | uniq;
...
2
2.6
2.6.17
2.8
2.8.6
2.8.7
2.8.8
2.8.9
2.8.10
2.8.11
2.8.12
2.8.13
2.8.14
2.8.15
2.8.16
2.8.17
2.8.18
2.8.19
2.8.20
2.8.21
2.8.22
2.8.23
3
3.0
3.0.0
3.0.1
3.0.2
3.0.3
3.0.4
3.0.5
3.0.6
3.0.7
3.0.504
3.2
3.2.0
3.2.1
3.2.2
3.2.3
3.2.4
3.2.5
3.2.6
3.2.7
3.2.8
3.2.9
3.2.10
3.2.11
3.2.100
4
4.0
4.0.0
4.0.1
4.0.2
4.0.4
4.0.5
4.0.6
4.0.7
4.0.8
32bit
alpine
latest
nanoserver
windowsservercore

---

If you want the bash_profile version:

function docker-tags () {
  name=$1
  # Initial URL
  url=https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/library/$name/tags/?page_size=100
  (
    # Keep looping until the variable URL is empty
    while [ ! -z $url ]; do
      # Every iteration of the loop prints out a single dot to show progress as it got through all the pages (this is inline dot)
      >&2 echo -n "."
      # Curl the URL and pipe the output to Python. Python will parse the JSON and print the very first line as the next URL (it will leave it blank if there are no more pages)
      # then continue to loop over the results extracting only the name; all will be stored in a variable called content
      content=$(curl -s $url | python -c 'import sys, json; data = json.load(sys.stdin); print(data.get("next", "") or ""); print("\n".join([x["name"] for x in data["results"]]))')
      # Let's get the first line of content which contains the next URL for the loop to continue
      url=$(echo "$content" | head -n 1)
      # Print the content without the first line (yes +2 is counter intuitive)
      echo "$content" | tail -n +2
    done;
    # Finally break the line of dots
    >&2 echo
  ) | cut -d '-' -f 1 | sort --version-sort | uniq;
}

And simply call it: docker-tags redis

Sample output:

$ docker-tags redis
...
2
2.6
2.6.17
2.8

--trunc----

32bit
alpine
latest
nanoserver
windowsservercore

Answer 3

As far as I know, the CLI does not allow searching/listing tags in a repository.

But if you know which tag you want, you can pull that explicitly by adding a colon and the image name: docker pull ubuntu:saucy