Project Harbor makes an entry into Rancher!

This article was originally posted on the VMware Cloud Native corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog.

Early this year I challenged myself with a pet project to create a Rancher catalog entry for Project Harbor (a VMware-started open sourced enterprise container registry).

This is something that I have been working on, off and on in my spare time. I originally envisioned this to be a private catalog entry. In other words, an entry that a Rancher administrator could add as a private catalog to her/his own instance.

I am happy to report that, a few weeks ago, Rancher decided to include the Project Harbor entry into the Rancher community catalog. The community catalog is a catalog curated by Rancher but populated by the community of partners and users.

The specific entry for Project Harbor is located here.

As a Rancher administrator, you don’t have to do anything to configure it other than enabling visibility of the Rancher community catalog. Once you have that option set, every Rancher user out there can point to Project Harbor and deploy it in their Cattle environments.

This is how the view of the Rancher community catalog looks like today:

Note that, as of today, this catalog entry only works with Rancher Cattle environments (depending on community interest support could be expanded to Rancher Kubernetes and Rancher Swarm environments as well).

Originally, this catalog entry had a couple of deployment models for Harbor (standalone and distributed). The last version of this catalog entry has only one model and depending on the parameters you select Harbor will be deployed on a single Docker host in the Cattle environment or it will be distributed across the hosts in a distributed fashion.

The README of the catalog entry will explain the various options and parameters available to you.

If you are interested in understanding the genesis of this pet project and all the technical details you have to consider to build such a catalog entry for Harbor, I suggest you read the original blog post that includes lots of technical insides about this implementation (including challenges, trade-offs, and limitations). Note that, at the time of this writing, the Rancher community catalog entry for Project Harbor will instantiate the OSS version of Harbor 1.1.1.

Last but not least, mind that the Rancher community catalog is supported by the community. The Project Harbor catalog entry follows the same support pattern so, if you have any issue with this catalog entry, please file an issue on the GitHub project.

––Massimo.