When do DockerHub auth tokens expire?

Question

When docker login succeeds an auth token is put in ~/.dockercfg. We are considering deploying a .dockercfg file to EC2 instances to all running of containers against private repository images. The alternative would be to run docker login on the instances, but I would prefer to give instances an auth token as opposed to an account password.

How long do the tokens issued by docker.io last before they expire?

Answer 1

That "token" will last as long as your username and password remain unchanged. It is just a base-64 encoded version of your username and password. The "auth" value doesn't come from the servers -- it is generated by the docker CLI in registry/auth.go