distribution/BUILDING.md

Building the registry source

Use-case

This is useful if you intend to actively work on the registry.

Alternatives

Most people should use the official Registry docker image.

People looking for advanced operational use cases might consider rolling their own image with a custom Dockerfile inheriting FROM registry:2.

OS X users who want to run natively can do so following the instructions here.

Gotchas

You are expected to know your way around with go & git.

If you are a casual user with no development experience, and no preliminary knowledge of go, building from source is probably not a good solution for you.

Build the development environment

The first prerequisite of properly building distribution targets is to have a Go development environment setup. Please follow How to Write Go Code for proper setup. If done correctly, you should have a GOROOT and GOPATH set in the environment.

If a Go development environment is setup, one can use go get to install the registry command from the current latest:

go get github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry

The above will install the source repository into the GOPATH.

Now create the directory for the registry data (this might require you to set permissions properly)

mkdir -p /var/lib/registry

... or alternatively export REGISTRY_STORAGE_FILESYSTEM_ROOTDIRECTORY=/somewhere if you want to store data into another location.

The registry binary can then be run with the following:

$ $GOPATH/bin/registry --version
$GOPATH/bin/registry github.com/docker/distribution v2.0.0-alpha.1+unknown

NOTE: While you do not need to use go get to checkout the distribution project, for these build instructions to work, the project must be checked out in the correct location in the GOPATH. This should almost always be $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/distribution.

The registry can be run with the default config using the following incantation:

$ $GOPATH/bin/registry serve $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry/config-example.yml
INFO[0000] endpoint local-5003 disabled, skipping        app.id=34bbec38-a91a-494a-9a3f-b72f9010081f version=v2.0.0-alpha.1+unknown
INFO[0000] endpoint local-8083 disabled, skipping        app.id=34bbec38-a91a-494a-9a3f-b72f9010081f version=v2.0.0-alpha.1+unknown
INFO[0000] listening on :5000                            app.id=34bbec38-a91a-494a-9a3f-b72f9010081f version=v2.0.0-alpha.1+unknown
INFO[0000] debug server listening localhost:5001

If it is working, one should see the above log messages.

Repeatable Builds

For the full development experience, one should cd into $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/distribution. From there, the regular go commands, such as go test, should work per package (please see Developing if they don't work).

A Makefile has been provided as a convenience to support repeatable builds. Please install the following into GOPATH for it to work:

go get github.com/golang/lint/golint

Once these commands are available in the GOPATH, run make to get a full build:

$ make
+ clean
+ fmt
+ vet
+ lint
+ build
github.com/docker/docker/vendor/src/code.google.com/p/go/src/pkg/archive/tar
github.com/sirupsen/logrus
github.com/docker/libtrust
...
github.com/yvasiyarov/gorelic
github.com/docker/distribution/registry/handlers
github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry
+ test
...
ok    github.com/docker/distribution/digest 7.875s
ok    github.com/docker/distribution/manifest 0.028s
ok    github.com/docker/distribution/notifications  17.322s
?     github.com/docker/distribution/registry [no test files]
ok    github.com/docker/distribution/registry/api/v2  0.101s
?     github.com/docker/distribution/registry/auth  [no test files]
ok    github.com/docker/distribution/registry/auth/silly  0.011s
...
+ /Users/sday/go/src/github.com/docker/distribution/bin/registry
+ /Users/sday/go/src/github.com/docker/distribution/bin/registry-api-descriptor-template
+ binaries

The above provides a repeatable build using the contents of the vendor directory. This includes formatting, vetting, linting, building, testing and generating tagged binaries. We can verify this worked by running the registry binary generated in the "./bin" directory:

$ ./bin/registry --version
./bin/registry github.com/docker/distribution v2.0.0-alpha.2-80-g16d8b2c.m

Optional build tags

Optional build tags can be provided using the environment variable BUILDTAGS.