--- description: Restricting access to your registry using a nginx proxy keywords: registry, on-prem, images, tags, repository, distribution, nginx, proxy, authentication, TLS, recipe, advanced title: Authenticate proxy with nginx --- ## Use-case People already relying on a nginx proxy to authenticate their users to other services might want to leverage it and have Registry communications tunneled through the same pipeline. Usually, that includes enterprise setups using LDAP/AD on the backend and a SSO mechanism fronting their internal http portal. ### Alternatives If you just want authentication for your registry, and are happy maintaining users access separately, you should really consider sticking with the native [basic auth registry feature](../deploying.md#native-basic-auth). ### Solution With the method presented here, you implement basic authentication for docker engines in a reverse proxy that sits in front of your registry. While we use a simple htpasswd file as an example, any other nginx authentication backend should be fairly easy to implement once you are done with the example. We also implement push restriction (to a limited user group) for the sake of the example. Again, you should modify this to fit your mileage. ### Gotchas While this model gives you the ability to use whatever authentication backend you want through the secondary authentication mechanism implemented inside your proxy, it also requires that you move TLS termination from the Registry to the proxy itself. Furthermore, introducing an extra http layer in your communication pipeline makes it more complex to deploy, maintain, and debug. Make sure the extra complexity is required. For instance, Amazon's Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in HTTPS mode already sets the following client header: ``` X-Real-IP X-Forwarded-For X-Forwarded-Proto ``` So if you have an Nginx instance sitting behind it, remove these lines from the example config below: ```none proxy_set_header Host $http_host; # required for docker client's sake proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; # pass on real client's IP proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; ``` Otherwise Nginx resets the ELB's values, and the requests are not routed properly. For more information, see [#970](https://github.com/docker/distribution/issues/970). ## Setting things up Review the [requirements](/registry/recipes/index.md#requirements), then follow these steps. 1. Create the required directories ```bash mkdir -p auth data ``` 2. Create the main nginx configuration. Paste this code block into a new file called `auth/nginx.conf`: ```conf events { worker_connections 1024; } http { upstream docker-registry { server registry:5000; } ## Set a variable to help us decide if we need to add the ## 'Docker-Distribution-Api-Version' header. ## The registry always sets this header. ## In the case of nginx performing auth, the header is unset ## since nginx is auth-ing before proxying. map $upstream_http_docker_distribution_api_version $docker_distribution_api_version { '' 'registry/2.0'; } server { listen 443 ssl; server_name myregistrydomain.com; # SSL ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/conf.d/domain.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/conf.d/domain.key; # Recommendations from https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_nginx.html ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH'; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; # disable any limits to avoid HTTP 413 for large image uploads client_max_body_size 0; # required to avoid HTTP 411: see Issue #1486 (https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/1486) chunked_transfer_encoding on; location /v2/ { # Do not allow connections from docker 1.5 and earlier # docker pre-1.6.0 did not properly set the user agent on ping, catch "Go *" user agents if ($http_user_agent ~ "^(docker\/1\.(3|4|5(?!\.[0-9]-dev))|Go ).*$" ) { return 404; } # To add basic authentication to v2 use auth_basic setting. auth_basic "Registry realm"; auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/conf.d/nginx.htpasswd; ## If $docker_distribution_api_version is empty, the header is not added. ## See the map directive above where this variable is defined. add_header 'Docker-Distribution-Api-Version' $docker_distribution_api_version always; proxy_pass http://docker-registry; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; # required for docker client's sake proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; # pass on real client's IP proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_read_timeout 900; } } } ``` 3. Create a password file `auth/nginx.htpasswd` for "testuser" and "testpassword". ```bash $ docker run --rm --entrypoint htpasswd registry:2 -Bbn testuser testpassword > auth/nginx.htpasswd ``` > **Note**: If you do not want to use `bcrypt`, you can omit the `-B` parameter. 4. Copy your certificate files to the `auth/` directory. ```bash $ cp domain.crt auth $ cp domain.key auth ``` 5. Create the compose file. Paste the following YAML into a new file called `docker-compose.yml`. ```yaml nginx: # Note : Only nginx:alpine supports bcrypt. # If you don't need to use bcrypt, you can use a different tag. # Ref. https://github.com/nginxinc/docker-nginx/issues/29 image: "nginx:alpine" ports: - 5043:443 links: - registry:registry volumes: - ./auth:/etc/nginx/conf.d - ./auth/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro registry: image: registry:2 ports: - 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 volumes: - ./data:/var/lib/registry ``` ## Starting and stopping Now, start your stack: docker-compose up -d Login with a "push" authorized user (using `testuser` and `testpassword`), then tag and push your first image: docker login -u=testuser -p=testpassword -e=root@example.ch myregistrydomain.com:5043 docker tag ubuntu myregistrydomain.com:5043/test docker push myregistrydomain.com:5043/test docker pull myregistrydomain.com:5043/test