K8s to pull private image from Github container registry (ghcr) using GITHUB_TOKEN

Question

Is it possible to pull private images in Github Container Registry using GITHUB_TOKEN?

If so, what do I need to configure in k8s?

Answer 1

Yes you can. You will have to create a secret object in your cluster.

kubectl create secret docker-registry ghcr-login-secret --docker-server=https://ghcr.io --docker-username=$YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME --docker-password=$YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN --docker-email=$YOUR_EMAIL

Note: Your credentials will become part of shell history, so be careful and remove the shell history afterwards.

This will internally create a dockerconfig.json with your provided values and generate a secret that will be used to authenticate with your registry.

You can then proceed to specify in your Pod specification that you are using a private registry and pass this secret as:

...
imagePullSecrets:
  - name: ghcr-login-secret
...

You can read more about external registry interfacing with Kubernetes here.