GitHub Container Registry Credential Helper

A tool to manage auth with personal access tokens (PATs) for individuals to authenticate to GitHub Container Registry and push images. Probably not meant for production workloads, as Actions will generate a short-lived token for each job.

Based on similar tools like docker/docker-credential-helpers, awslabs/amazon-ecr-credential-helper, and GoogleCloudPlatform/docker-credential-gcr.

How it Works

Uses your GitHub username/password to create a personal access token. Uses the gh utilities to ensure the PAT has write:packages access. If it does not, it will run the web-auth flow from the CLI and overwrite the existing token.

Once that is finished, we just rely on the gh configuration files as the source of truth for a username and token, and provide that to the docker daemon when requested.

Configuration

Add this as a credsHelper in your Docker CLI Config:

// $HOME/.docker/config.json
{
  "credsHelper": {
    "ghcr.io": "ghcr-login"
  }
}