Synology on Rails Part VI: An Improved Docker Registry

25 September 2024 — about a 1 minute read

After a few months of pushing container images to my home grown registry, I was noticing that my server was filling up. I wasn’t worried about running out of space soon, but what about a few months from now?

There are a handful of UI projects out there that run on top of the Docker Registry and provide UI to allow management of old images, retention policies, etc. Just what I needed.

I looked into deploying a few of them and ran into various complexities. Did I have all the dependencies? I think it’s running? But I’m getting errors. I was ready to throw up my hands.

A New Project has Entered the Chat

I found a project that unified the default Docker Registry image and the Registry UI project from Quiq into one docker-compose.yml. This looked promising.

My only concern was that the last commit was 4 years ago. And then I couldn’t get it all running correctly in the latest Synology DSM, version 7.x. I lost about a half of a day figuring out what was wrong.

A DSM 7.x Solution

But after that work, I was able to bring this project up-to-date in a fork. The README has more detailed instructions. Check it out!

The full details are in the README, but from a high level:

  • One Container Manager Project that downloads and boots both the Registry and the UI in their own containers
  • A small workaround (an extra reverse proxy) due to a Web Station limitation
  • All the management is done through the Container Manager UI (just like your apps you’ve been pushing)

I’ve submitted a PR to the original project, but given the age, I’ll keep an eye on my fork for feedback.

This article is part of the series Synology on Rails and is tagged with web development, ruby, rails, software engineering, and deployment.