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cli/registry/login: Add the `--password-env` flag

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#5,971 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
50/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start by locating the Docker CLI's login command and its existing --password-stdin handling. Trace how command-line flags reach authentication, then verify that --password-env reads the named environment variable and supports the GitLab CI example without exposing the password.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

kind/feature status/0-triage
Description

Add support for providing registry passwords via environment variables, which is particularly useful in CI pipelines. For example, GitLab stores registry passwords in the CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD environment variable.

With the --password-env flag, authenticating to a registry is as simple as:

docker login --username "${CI_REGISTRY_USER}" --password-env "CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD" "${CI_REGISTRY}"

Alternatives Considered

  • Using docker login -p "${VAR}" with warning suppression

    • Shell history concerns don't apply with variable substitution
    • Tokens are often short-lived, reducing security concerns
    • Could introduce a way to suppress warnings via environment variables

  • Passing passwords via STDIN (current recommended method):

    echo "${CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD}" | docker login --username "${CI_REGISTRY_USER}" --password-stdin "${CI_REGISTRY}"

    Avoids warnings but adds complexity to command chains

Dominant language
Go
Stars
6.1k
Forks
2.2k
Avg merge
1d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
47

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