watchtower/docs/credential-helpers.md

Some private docker registries (the most prominent probably being AWS ECR) use non-standard ways of authentication. To be able to use this together with watchtower, we need to use a credential helper.

To keep the image size small we've decided to not include any helpers in the watchtower image, instead we'll put the helper in a separate container and mount it using volumes.

Example

Example implementation for use with amazon-ecr-credential-helper:

FROM golang:latest

ENV CGO_ENABLED 0
ENV REPO github.com/awslabs/amazon-ecr-credential-helper/ecr-login/cli/docker-credential-ecr-login

RUN go get -u $REPO

RUN rm /go/bin/docker-credential-ecr-login

RUN go build \
  -o /go/bin/docker-credential-ecr-login \
  /go/src/$REPO

WORKDIR /go/bin/

and the docker-compose definition:

version: "3"

services:
  watchtower:
    image: index.docker.io/containrrr/watchtower:latest
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - <PATH_TO_HOME_DIR>/.docker/config.json:/config.json
      - helper:/go/bin
    environment:
      - HOME=/
      - PATH=$PATH:/go/bin
      - AWS_REGION=<AWS_REGION>
      - AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<AWS_ACCESS_KEY>
      - AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
volumes:
  helper: {}

and for <PATH_TO_HOME_DIR>/.docker/config.json:

  {
    "HttpHeaders" : {
      "User-Agent" : "Docker-Client/19.03.1 (XXXXXX)"
    },
    "credsStore" : "osxkeychain",
    "auths" : {
      "xyzxyzxyz.dkr.ecr.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com" : {},
      "https://index.docker.io/v1/": {}
    },
    "credHelpers": {
      "xyzxyzxyz.dkr.ecr.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com" : "ecr-login",
      "index.docker.io": "osxkeychain"
    }
  }

Note: osxkeychain can be changed to your prefered credentials helper