Distribution: The Open-Source Container Registry
Shriira Press
The open-source registry at the heart of the container world — how Distribution stores, addresses, and serves the images that run modern infrastructure.
Welcome to Distribution: The Open-Source Container Registry.
Distribution is the reference implementation of the OCI Distribution Specification: a stateless, horizontally scalable server that stores and serves container images and other content-addressable artifacts. It began life as the Docker Registry — the code that originally powered Docker Hub — and now quietly underpins Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, GitLab Container Registry, DigitalOcean's registry, and the storage core of CNCF Harbor. This book explains what a registry actually is and how this one works. We start with the problem a registry solves and the content-addressable model that makes it trustworthy, then walk through manifests, blobs, and tags; the Registry HTTP API V2 that every docker pull speaks; the pluggable storage drivers for filesystem, S3, GCS, and Azure; token-based authentication and authorization; garbage collection for reclaiming space; and the configuration that ties it all together — including pull-through caching, notifications, and health checks. A closing chapter looks at how Distribution is run in practice and where it sits in the cloud-native ecosystem.
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A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
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