Dockershim deprecation does NOT impact kind.  🐳

If you already use kind you've actually been testing your workloads on containerd!

While kind uses docker or podman on your host, it uses CRI / containerd "inside" the nodes and does not use dockershim.

Carry on and be KiND! ❤️

Local Registry

This guide covers how to configure KIND with a local container image registry.

In the future this will be replaced by a built-in feature, and this guide will cover usage instead.

Create A Cluster And Registry 🔗︎

The following shell script will create a local docker registry and a kind cluster with it enabled.

examples/kind-with-registry.sh 
#!/bin/sh
set -o errexit

# create registry container unless it already exists
reg_name='kind-registry'
reg_port='5000'
running="$(docker inspect -f '{{.State.Running}}' "${reg_name}" 2>/dev/null || true)"
if [ "${running}" != 'true' ]; then
  docker run \
    -d --restart=always -p "127.0.0.1:${reg_port}:5000" --name "${reg_name}" \
    registry:2
fi

# create a cluster with the local registry enabled in containerd
cat <<EOF | kind create cluster --config=-
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
containerdConfigPatches:
- |-
  [plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".registry.mirrors."localhost:${reg_port}"]
    endpoint = ["http://${reg_name}:${reg_port}"]
EOF

# connect the registry to the cluster network
# (the network may already be connected)
docker network connect "kind" "${reg_name}" || true

# Document the local registry
# https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/sig-cluster-lifecycle/generic/1755-communicating-a-local-registry
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: local-registry-hosting
  namespace: kube-public
data:
  localRegistryHosting.v1: |
    host: "localhost:${reg_port}"
    help: "https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/local-registry/"
EOF

Using The Registry 🔗︎

The registry can be used like this.

  1. First we'll pull an image docker pull gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0
  2. Then we'll tag the image to use the local registry docker tag gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0 localhost:5000/hello-app:1.0
  3. Then we'll push it to the registry docker push localhost:5000/hello-app:1.0
  4. And now we can use the image kubectl create deployment hello-server --image=localhost:5000/hello-app:1.0

If you build your own image and tag it like localhost:5000/image:foo and then use it in kubernetes as localhost:5000/image:foo.