pull access denied repository does not exist or may require docker login

Question

Please note that the error message from Docker is misleading.

$ docker build deploy/.
Sending build context to Docker daemon  5.632kB
Step 1/16 : FROM rhel7:latest
pull access denied for rhel7, repository does not exist or may require 'docker login'

It says that it may require 'docker login'. I struggled with this. I realized the image does not exist at https://hub.docker.com any more. I hope this helps someone.

Just make sure to write the docker name correctly!

In my case, I wrote (notice the extra 'u'):

FROM ubunutu:16.04

The correct docker name is:

FROM ubuntu:16.04

I had the same issue. In my case it was a private registry. So I had to create a secret as shown here

and then we have to add the image pull secret to the deployment.yaml file as shown below.

pods/private-reg-pod.yaml  
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: private-reg
spec:
  containers:
  - name: private-reg-container
    image: <your-private-image>
  imagePullSecrets:
  - name: regcred

The message usually comes when you put the wrong image name. Please check your image if it exists on the Docker repository with the correct tag. It helped me.

docker run -d -p 80:80 --name ngnix ngnix:latest
Unable to find image 'ngnix:latest' locally
docker: Error response from daemon: pull access denied for ngnix, repository does not exist or may require 'docker login': denied: requested access to the resource is denied.
See 'docker run --help'.
$ docker run -d -p 80:80 --name nginx nginx:latest
Unable to find image 'nginx:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/nginx

November 2020 and later

If this error is new, and pulling from Docker Hub worked in the past, note Docker Hub now introduced rate limiting in Nov 2020

You will frequently see messages like:

Warning: No authentication provided, using CircleCI credentials for pulls from Docker Hub.

From Circle CI and other similar tools that use Docker Hub. Or:

Error response from daemon: pull access denied for cimg/mongo, repository does not exist or may require 'docker login': denied: requested access to the resource is denied

You'll need to specify the credentials used to fetch the image:

For CircleCI users:

      - image: circleci/mongo:4.4.2

        # Needed to pull down Mongo images from Docker hub
        # Get from https://hub.docker.com/
        # Set up at https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/org/sapp
        auth:
          username: $DOCKERHUB_USERNAME
          password: $DOCKERHUB_PASSWORD

I solved this by inserting a language at the front of the docker image

FROM python:3.7-alpine