6.4. Image stream tags

An image stream tag is a named pointer to an image in an image stream. It is abbreviated as istag. An image stream tag is used to reference or retrieve an image for a given image stream and tag.

Image stream tags can reference any local or externally managed image. It contains a history of images represented as a stack of all images the tag ever pointed to. Whenever a new or existing image is tagged under particular image stream tag, it is placed at the first position in the history stack. The image previously occupying the top position is available at the second position. This allows for easy rollbacks to make tags point to historical images again.

The following image stream tag is from an ImageStream object:

  tags:
  - items:
    - created: 2017-09-02T10:15:09Z
      dockerImageReference: 172.30.56.218:5000/test/origin-ruby-sample@sha256:47463d94eb5c049b2d23b03a9530bf944f8f967a0fe79147dd6b9135bf7dd13d
      generation: 2
      image: sha256:909de62d1f609a717ec433cc25ca5cf00941545c83a01fb31527771e1fab3fc5
    - created: 2017-09-29T13:40:11Z
      dockerImageReference: 172.30.56.218:5000/test/origin-ruby-sample@sha256:909de62d1f609a717ec433cc25ca5cf00941545c83a01fb31527771e1fab3fc5
      generation: 1
      image: sha256:47463d94eb5c049b2d23b03a9530bf944f8f967a0fe79147dd6b9135bf7dd13d
    tag: latest

Image stream tags can be permanent tags or tracking tags.

You can create your own image stream tags for your own needs.

The image stream tag is composed of the name of the image stream and a tag, separated by a colon:

<imagestream name>:<tag>

For example, to refer to the sha256:47463d94eb5c049b2d23b03a9530bf944f8f967a0fe79147dd6b9135bf7dd13d image in the ImageStream object example earlier, the image stream tag would be:

origin-ruby-sample:latest