The Azure Container Registry is an online repository for storing Docker images (think the Docker Hub).

What’s cool about this is that we can store our images in the same data centre as our deployments, so spinning up containers from the images should be pretty quick. Let’s run through setting up a Registry and pushing an image to it.

But first things first, a quick terminology reminder 🙂

Registry – this is a remote service that will store all our images
Repository – this is a collection of images

Cool, let’s run through setting up a Registry and pushing an image to it. I’ll be using the Azure-CLI and VS Code with the Azure-CLI plugin. However, I’ll be using a powershell terminal within VS Code. This is because I want to access Docker on my Windows 10 machine, so that I can push an image up to the ACR.

First thing to do is check that the azure-cli is installed: –

az --version

N.B. – You can install it from here if you don’t already have it

Then we need to log in to azure: –

az login

N.B. – You can specify a username and password with this command HOWEVER it doesn’t work for accounts with 2 factor authentication (I mean…really)

Anyway…now we can create a resource group for our registry: –

az group create --name apcontainers1 --location westus2

Then we can create the registry: –

az acr create --resource-group apcontainers1 --name ApContainerRegistry01 --sku Basic

I’m setting this up with the Basic SKU (as this is a demo). You can read more about the Registry SKU levels here

In order to be able to push to the registry, we need to log in: –

az acr login --name ApContainerRegistry01

And we also need to get the login server of the registry: –

az acr list --resource-group apcontainers1 --query "[].{acrLoginServer:loginServer}" --output table

N.B. – save the output of this command.

OK, now let’s look locally for an image that we want to push to our ACR: –

docker images

I’m going to push my custom dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent image. It’s a public image so if you want to use it, just run: –

docker pull dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent:latest

So similar to pushing to the Docker hub, we need to tag the image with the login server name that we retrieved a couple of commands ago and the name of the image: –

docker tag dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent apcontainerregistry01.azurecr.io/sqlserverlinuxagent:latest

We can see the new tag locally by running: –

docker images

Cool! Ok, so now we can push to the ACR: –

docker push apcontainerregistry01.azurecr.io/sqlserverlinuxagent:latest

And then confirm that the image is there: –

az acr repository list --name apcontainerregistry01 --output table

What this has done is create a repository called sqlserverlinuxagent with our image tagged underneath it. To see the image run: –

az acr repository show-tags --name apcontainerregistry01 --repository sqlserverlinuxagent

So we have a repository called sqlserverlinuxagent with one image tagged as latest underneath it.

Awesome, now that the image is there we can use it to deploy an Azure Container Instance. I’ll cover how to do that in my next post 🙂

To clean up, we delete the repository: –

az acr repository delete --name ApContainerRegistry01 --repository sqlserverlinuxagent

Oh, if you want to delete the registry…

az acr delete --name apcontainerregistry01

And a more nuclear option (which will delete the resource group): –

az group delete --name apcontainers1

Thanks for reading!

The April 2018 update for Windows brought a few cool things but the best one (imho) is that now we can now connect to Windows containers locally using ‘localhost’ and the port specified upon container runtime.

Let’s have a look at how this works.

First, spin up a container:-

docker run -d -p 15789:1433 `
    --env ACCEPT_EULA=Y `
        --env SA_PASSWORD=Testing1122 `
            --name testcontainer `
                microsoft/mssql-server-windows-developer:latest

Previously, if we wanted to connect to the container locally, we would have had to grab its Private IP by running: –

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' testcontainer

Not any more though! We can now use ‘localhost’ and the port number.

This update was available for a while in the Windows 10 insiders track but it’s now gone GA. Pretty cool as this functionality has been around for Linux containers since, well, forever. 🙂

Thanks for reading!