I decided to try my hand at running my own locally hosted docker registry. After some quick research, I settled upon Sonatype’s Nexus. Now, how to get it up and running within a Docker container? Let’s start with a docker-compose.yaml file. I don’t necessarily care about a particular version so let’s pull the latest Nexus 3 image from Sonatype via Docker hub.

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nexus:
    image: sonatype/nexus3:latest

Of course, we’ll need to expose the Nexus ports and map them to ports on the host machine so let’s add that definition to the docker-compose yaml file. We’ll need both the Nexus manager port (8081) as well as the port we plan to use when we setup the hosted docker repository within Nexus (8888).

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nexus:
    image: sonatype/nexus3:latest
    ports:
        - 8081:8081
        - 8888:8888

That should be all we need to get everything up and running but I’m going to add an additional step and map the nexus-data directory to a directory on my host machine in case I decide to bring this container down and back up later. This leaves us with:

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nexus:
    image: sonatype/nexus3:latest
    ports:
        - 8081:8081
        - 8888:8888
    volumes:
        - ~/nexus-data-on-host:/nexus-data

Now that we have the docker-compose.yaml file, let’s spin up the container.

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docker-compose up

We could have run that in detached mode with a “-d” option but I wanted to monitor the logs and wait for Nexus to report it is up and running.

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Started Sonatype Nexus OSS 3.9.0-01

Success! We have Nexus up and running. Now let’s log into localhost:8081 with the default username/password combination of admin/admin123 and setup a hosted docker repository on the port we exposed for it in the docker-compose file (8888). If your looking for instructions on how to do this consult the Nexus documentation on Sonatype’s site. Once we have that registry created let’s log into the registry with

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docker login http://localhost:8888/repository/docker-hosted/

Finally, let’s tag an image we have locally and push it to our registry

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docker tag audiojak/lightning localhost:8888/audiojak:latest

docker push localhost:8888/audiojak:latest