Elastic Container Registry

Let’s set up an Elastic Container Registry (ECR) to host our private docker images for use with other services such as ECS.

Prerequisites

Make sure you’ve configured your CLI using our aws-cli guide. You should be able to run the following command, replacing with your profile name, and it should give you some long hashed output:

aws ecr get-login-password --region us-west-2 --profile PROFILE

Create an Private ECR

AWS Website

In the search bar, search for Elastic Container Registry, and open it. At the top right, click Create repository.

The only field this guide cares about is the Repository name, which should be comprised of two names:

• Namespace: You can use this to group similar repositories. Something like the name of your application should suffice.

• Repo-Name: This is the actual name of the repository. Use whatever you like.

For this example, I’ll use myapp/myapp.

Once you click Create, you’ll have an ECR.

For the rest of the guide, you’ll need the ECR URI, which you can find and copy right from the list of repositories.

Terraform

The following block of Terraform code will create the same ECR as above:

resource "aws_ecr_repository" "ecr" {
    name = "myapp/myapp"
}

output "ecr_uri" {
    value = aws_ecr_repository.ecr.repository_url
}

This will output your ECR URI, which you’ll need for the rest of this guide.

Pushing an Image to your ECR

Now that you have a configured ECR and your ECR URI, let’s push an image using Docker.

Set an environment variable to hold this URI for ease of typing commands:

export ECR_URI="YOUR_URI_HERE"

Let’s assume you already have your container built and tagged as myapp:v1.0.0.

[!NOTE] If you don’t know how to build a container, see our introduction to containers guide

You need to tag your container with the repository url

docker tag myapp:v1.0.0 "${ECR_URI}:v1.0.0"`

Now log into your ECR with the following command

aws ecr get-login-password --region $AWS_REGION | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin $ECR_URI

Finally, you can simply push the image

docker push "${ECR_URI}:v1.0.0"