Chapter 2. Getting started with Red Hat Quay

This document uses podman for creating and deploying containers. If you do not have podman installed on your system, you should be able to use the equivalent docker commands. For more information on podman and related technologies, see Building, running, and managing Linux containers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Install the latest RHEL 8 server. You can do a minimal install (shell access only) or Server plus GUI (if you want a desktop). Register and subscribe your RHEL server system as described in How to register and subscribe a system…​. The following commands register your system and list available subscriptions. Choose an available RHEL server subscription, attach to its pool ID and upgrade to the latest software:

+

# subscription-manager register --username=<user_name> --password=<password>
# subscription-manager refresh
# subscription-manager list --available
# subscription-manager attach --pool=<pool_id>
# yum update -y

Install podman, if it is not already present on your system:

$ sudo yum install -y podman

Alternatively, you can install the container-tools module, which pulls in the full set of container software packages:

$ sudo yum module install -y container-tools

Set up authentication to registry.redhat.io, so that you can pull the quay container, as described in Red Hat Container Registry Authentication. Note that this differs from earlier Red Hat Quay releases where the images were hosted on quay.io.

For example, you can log in to the registry:

$ sudo podman login registry.redhat.io
Username: <username>
Password: <password>

If you have a firewall running on your system, to access the Red Hat Quay config tool (port 8443) and application (ports 8080 and 443) outside of the local system, run the following commands (add --zone=<yourzone> for each command to open ports on a particular zone):

# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8443/tcp
# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8080/tcp
# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=443/tcp
# firewall-cmd --reload

There are a number of ways to configure the component containers in Red Hat Quay so that they can talk to each other:

This document uses port mapping in the subsequent examples, and assumes a static IP address for your host system. In this example, quay-server has the IP address 192.168.1.112.

$ cat /etc/hosts
...
192.168.1.112   quay-server

In this proof-of-concept scenario, you will use a directory on the local file system to persist database data.

Use podman to run the Redis container, specifying the port and password:

$ sudo podman run -d --rm --name redis \
  -p 6379:6379 \
  -e REDIS_PASSWORD=strongpassword \
  registry.redhat.io/rhel8/redis-5:1

In the configuration editor, you enter details for the following:

When all required fields have been set, validate your settings by choosing the Validate Configuration Changes button. If any errors are reported, continue editing your configuration until all required fields are valid and Red Hat Quay can connect to your database and Redis servers.

Once your configuration is valid, download the configuration file and then stop the quay container that is running the configuration editor.

Unpack the configuration bundle so that Quay can use it, for example:

$ mkdir $QUAY/config
$ cp ~/Downloads/quay-config.tar.gz $QUAY/config
$ cd $QUAY/config
$ tar xvf quay-config.tar.gz

In this proof-of-concept deployment, use the local file system to store the registry images:

$ mkdir $QUAY/storage
$ setfacl -m u:1001:-wx $QUAY/storage

Use podman to run the quay container, specifying the appropriate volumes for your configuration data and local storage for image data:

$ sudo podman run -d --rm -p 8080:8080  \
   --name=quay \
   -v $QUAY/config:/conf/stack:Z \
   -v $QUAY/storage:/datastorage:Z \
   registry.redhat.io/quay/quay-rhel8:v3.4.7

To test pushing and pulling images from the Red Hat Quay registry, first pull a sample image from an external registry:

$ sudo podman pull busybox
Trying to pull docker.io/library/busybox...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 4c892f00285e done
Copying config 22667f5368 done
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
22667f53682a2920948d19c7133ab1c9c3f745805c14125859d20cede07f11f9

Use the podman images command to see the local copy:

$ sudo podman images
REPOSITORY                          TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
docker.io/library/busybox           latest   22667f53682a   14 hours ago    1.45 MB
...

Tag this image, in preparation for pushing it to the Red Hat Quay registry:

$ sudo podman tag docker.io/library/busybox quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test

Now push the image to the Red Hat Quay registry:

$ sudo podman push --tls-verify=false quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 6b245f040973 done
Copying config 22667f5368 done
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures

At this point, you can use your browser to see the tagged image in your repository. To test access to the image from the command line, first delete the local copy of the image:

$ sudo podman rmi quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test
Untagged: quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test

Now pull the image again, this time from your Red Hat Quay registry:

$ sudo podman pull --tls-verify=false quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test
Trying to pull quay-server:8080/quayadmin/busybox:test...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 6ef22a7134ba [--------------------------------------] 0.0b / 0.0b
Copying config 22667f5368 done
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
22667f53682a2920948d19c7133ab1c9c3f745805c14125859d20cede07f11f9