Building Quay From Sources for MicroShift CI

Introduction

MicroShift CI requires a local mirror registry for storing container images and container build artifacts. This is necessary for improving the stability of tests (less dependency on network flakes) and overall performance (faster image access).

The simplest local mirror registry tool that can be used in MicroShift CI is Docker Distribution Registry, but it lacks support of sigstore, which forces its users not to use signature validation.

Project Quay provides for a more feature rich alternative, but it comes with a few challenges:

• Quay registry is more complex to set up and more resource consuming
• Quay registry is not supported on the aarch64 platform

Quay can be deployed in a Quick Local Development mode that runs the registry inside local containers. To mitigate the lack of the aarch64 platform support, it is necessary to pre-build the required container images from Project Quay sources and store them at [quay.io/microshift] registry to be consumed by MicroShift CI.

The remainder of this document describes how to build Quay container images from sources and store them in a cloud registry.

Prerequisites

Run the following command to initialize the Quay Git repository.

git clone https://github.com/quay/quay.git
cd quay

Review the list of Quay Releases to select the branch. It is recommended to use a release with the latest tag (v3.11.7 at the time of writing this document).

Check out the appropriate code branch.

QUAY_VER=v3.11.7
git checkout "${QUAY_VER}"

Install the RPM dependencies required to build Quay images from sources.

sudo dnf install -y podman podman-docker podman-compose
sudo ln -s $(which podman-compose) /usr/bin/docker-compose

Image Build

Run the following command to build Quay container images.

make local-dev-build-images

Make sure that required quay-local image was built successfully.

$ podman images quay-local
REPOSITORY            TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED        SIZE
localhost/quay-local  latest      7f4def76a288  2 minutes ago  786 MB

Image Push

Log into your quay.io account at the microshift organization.

podman login quay.io/microshift

Tag the local image with the version and current architecture, and push it to the cloud registry.

podman tag localhost/quay-local:latest quay.io/microshift/quay:${QUAY_VER}-$(uname -m)
podman push quay.io/microshift/quay:${QUAY_VER}-$(uname -m)

Finally, browse to Quay Repository Settings and make sure the repository has public access.