Using Google Container Registry, Docker Buildx, and GitHub Actions

Today, I was trying to integrate the docker/build-push-action with Google Container Registry (GCR). I was able to get the build working, but I was unable to push the image to GCR due to authentication issues. The solution involved the following.

1. Using the google-github-actions/auth action to authenticate with Google Cloud.
2. Calling gcloud auth configure-docker --quiet gcr.io to configure the Docker CLI to use the Google Cloud credentials.

The workflow looks like this.

- name: Setup auth
  id: "auth"
  uses: "google-github-actions/auth@v0"
  with:
    workload_identity_provider: ${{ secrets.WORKLOAD_IDENTITY_PROVIDER }}
    service_account: "github-deployer@${{ secrets.GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT }}.iam.gserviceaccount.com"
- name: Setup docker
  uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v2
- name: Authenticate docker
  run: |
    gcloud auth configure-docker --quiet gcr.io
- name: Build and push
  uses: docker/build-push-action@v3
  with:
    context: .
    push: true
    tags: ${{ env.IMAGE }}
    cache-from: type=gha
    cache-to: type=gha,mode=max

I was unable to get the cache working with GCR. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if I’m doing something wrong.

IAM Role

I also created a custom role based upon Storage Legacy Bucket Writer to add to the github-deployer@ service account.

This includes the following permissions.

• storage.buckets.get
• storage.multipartUploads.abort
• storage.multipartUploads.create
• storage.multipartUploads.list
• storage.multipartUploads.listParts
• storage.objects.create
• storage.objects.delete
• storage.objects.list

And it works! 🎉