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Harbor

Harbor logo

Project Harbor is an open source trusted cloud-native registry project. It stores, manages, signs, and scans content. It can help people to confidently manage and serve container images and related artifacts. It can be a best registry for Kubernetes.

As we know, Harbors can provide safe anchorage and permit the transfer of cargo and passengers between ships and the shore. Since this project include many of these features , thus the name ’Harbor ’ is choosed to this project.

Nowadays, tracking and managing registries safely is one of important and difficult challenges for organisations today. Harbor can be a feasible solution which addresses this problem. Harbor is a free sofware, and portable across multiple operating systems with the same code base.

Building secure registries is one of the inspiration to bring this project into act. The project started in 2014 by Vmware.
After witnessing, huge support and positive feedback from reviewers, it is open sourced two years later on GitHub. Communities across global contributed to make it one of successful open-source project. In 2018 it is donated to CNCF(Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

Below is the synopsis of Harbor in GitHub:

  • **(CTO & Co-Founder):** Haining Henry Zhang
  • **Primary Language:** Go,Typescript, HTML
  • **Number of stars:** 15.8k
  • **Forks:** 3.8k
  • **Commits:** 6600+
  • **Contributors:** 120+

Some of features of Harbor are:

  • Role-Based Access control: Users and repositories are organized into projects. Users can have different permissions for the images in different projects.
  • Replication: Harbor provides labels to isolate images replication to replicate repositories from one Harbor instance to another.
  • Vulnerability scanning: Harbor uses “clair” to scan image regularly and warn users for vulnerabilities.
  • Helm chart management: harbor provides management of Helm charts isolated by projects and controlled by RBAC.
  • Graphical User portal: Users can easily browse, search repositories, and manage projects.
  • RESTful API: RESTful APIs for most administrative operations, easy to integrate with external systems.

Architecture

Harbor installation and configuration:

  • Installation Process:

  • Confirm prequisites needed to install harbor in your system Download the Harbor Installer Configure HTTPS Accesss to Harbor and the Harbor YML File. *Run the Installer Script.

  • Deploy Harbor on Kubernetes:

    It is recommended to use Helm for installing Harbor on a Kubernetes cluster.

  • Post-Installation Configuration:

    Through the web console log into your Harbor.

Real world use cases:

  • Commercial products based on harbor: Vmware Tanzu Network Registry, OVH Cloud Registry, Tencent Enterprise Registry, Rancher Registry and more.
  • Adopters running Harbor in production: JD.com,Tencent, Bytedence, China Mobile, Intel, Agoda, TrendMicro and many more.