Sharing Docker Images independently of docker hub or any registry

In certain situations, you may find it impossible to upload your Docker image to Docker Hub or any private registry. This article explores alternative methods for sharing your images without the need to publish them to Docker Hub or any private registry. The save and load commands are two options that can serve this purpose

Docker Hub Images

Let’s pull the busy box from the docker hub.

mkdir saveimage
cd saveimage
docker pull busybox

docker has a save command where you can save into a tar file. We can list the directory after saving.

docker save busybox > busybox.tar

Let’s list all the images and remove the busybox image from the local docker registry.

Load the image from the tar file. once you load the image you can interact with it and run the container as an official image.

docker load < busybox.tar

Customized Images

we can do the same thing with user-customized images as well. Let’s clone this repo and see how it works.

git clone https://github.com/ahmedbhl/dockerfiles-cmdvsentry.git

Build the docker image with this command

docker build -t nodeversion -f echo/Dockerfile.cmd .

Use save command to save the image to the tar file.

// save to tar file
docker save nodeversion > nodeversion.tar
// load from tar file
docker load < nodeversion.tar

Conclusion

This is a great way to share the images without any registry. Sometimes you want to save images in the tar file and use it in other images.

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