I am a big proponent of open source technologies. I have been using Gitea for a couple years now in my homelab. A few years ago I moved most of my code off of Github and onto my self hosted instance. I recently came across a really handy feature that I didn’t know Gitea had and was pleasantly surprised by: Package Registry. You are no doubt familiar with what a package registry is in the broad context. Here are some examples of package registries you probably use on a regular basis:

• npm
• cargo
• docker
• composer
• nuget
• helm

There are a number of reasons why you would want to self host a registry. For example, in my home lab I have some Docker images that are specific to my use cases and I don’t necessarily want them on a public registry. I’m also not concerned about losing the artifacts as I can easily recreate them from code. Gitea makes this really easy to setup, in fact it comes baked in with the installation. For the sake of this post I will just assume that you already have Gitea installed and setup.

Since the package registry is baked in and enabled by default, I will demonstrate how easy it is to push a docker image. We will pull the default alpine image, re-tag it and push it to our internal registry:

# Pull the official Alpine image
docker pull alpine:latest

# Re tag the image with our local registry information
docker tag alpine:latest git.hackanooga.com/mikeconrad/alpine:latest

# Login using your gitea user account
docker login git.hackanooga.com

# Push the image to our registry
docker push git.hackanooga.com/mikeconrad/alpine:latest

Now log into your Gitea instance, navigate to your user account and look for packages. You should see the newly uploaded alpine image.