Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper is a credential helper for the Docker daemon that makes it easier to use Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Installing
  • Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023)
  • Amazon Linux 2 (AL2)
  • Mac OS
  • Debian Buster (and future versions)
  • Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo and newer
  • Arch Linux
  • From Source
• Configuration
  • Docker
  • AWS credentials
  • Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper
• Usage
• Troubleshooting
• Security disclosures
• License

Prerequisites

You must have at least Docker 1.11 installed on your system.

You also must have AWS credentials available. See the AWS credentials section for details on how to use different AWS credentials.

Installing

Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023)

You can install the Amazon ECR Credential Helper from the Amazon Linux 2023 repositories.

$ sudo dnf install -y amazon-ecr-credential-helper

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Amazon Linux 2 (AL2)

You can install the Amazon ECR Credential Helper from the docker or ecs extras.

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras enable docker
$ sudo yum install amazon-ecr-credential-helper

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Mac OS

A community-maintained Homebrew formula is available in the core tap.

$ brew install docker-credential-helper-ecr

On macOS, another community-maintained installation method is to use MacPorts.

$ sudo port install docker-credential-helper-ecr

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Debian Buster (and future versions)

You can install the Amazon ECR Credential Helper from the Debian Buster archives. This package will also be included in future releases of Debian.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install amazon-ecr-credential-helper

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo and newer

You can install the Amazon ECR Credential Helper from the Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo (and newer) archives.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install amazon-ecr-credential-helper

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Arch Linux

A community-maintained package is available in the Arch User Repository.

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/amazon-ecr-credential-helper.git
$ cd amazon-ecr-credential-helper
$ makepkg -si

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Windows

Windows executables are available via GitHub releases.

[!NOTE] Windows ARM support is considered experimental.

See https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-ecr-credential-helper/issues/795

From Source

To build and install the Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper, we suggest Go 1.19 or later, git and make installed on your system.

If you just installed Go, make sure you also have added it to your PATH or Environment Vars (Windows). For example:

$ export GOPATH=$HOME/go
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Or in Windows:

setx GOPATH %USERPROFILE%\go
<your existing PATH definitions>;%USERPROFILE%\go\bin

If you haven't defined the PATH, the command below will fail silently, and running docker-credential-ecr-login will output: command not found

You can install this via the go command line tool.

To install run:

go install github.com/awslabs/amazon-ecr-credential-helper/ecr-login/cli/docker-credential-ecr-login@latest

[!WARNING] Disclaimer: the Dockerfile in this repository is used to test cross-compilation of the Amazon ECR credential helper binaries in GitHub Actions CI and as a developer utility for building locally from source. It is a reference implementation and not security hardened for building and running production containers.

If you already have Docker environment, just clone this repository anywhere and run make build-in-docker. This command builds the binary with Go inside the Docker container and output it to local directory.

With TARGET_GOOS environment variable, you can also cross compile the binary.

Once you have installed the credential helper, see the Configuration section for instructions on how to configure Docker to work with the helper.

Configuration

Docker

There is no need to use docker login or docker logout.

Place the docker-credential-ecr-login binary on your PATH and set the contents of your ~/.docker/config.json file to be:

{
	"credsStore": "ecr-login"
}

This configures the Docker daemon to use the credential helper for all Amazon ECR registries.

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper can be used alongside your existing docker login authentication tokens:

{
	"credsStore": "ecr-login",
	"auths": {
		"https://index.docker.io/v1/": {
			"auth": [docker.io-auth-token]
		},
		"registry.gitlab.com": {
			"auth": [gitlab-auth-token]
		},
	}
}

With Docker 1.13.0 or greater, you can configure Docker to use different credential helpers for different ECR registries. To use this credential helper for a specific ECR registry, create a credHelpers section with the URI of your ECR registry:

{
	"credHelpers": {
		"public.ecr.aws": "ecr-login",
		"<aws_account_id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com": "ecr-login"
	}
}

This is useful if you use docker to operate on registries that use different authentication credentials.

AWS credentials

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper allows you to use AWS credentials stored in different locations. Standard ones include:

• The shared credentials file (~/.aws/credentials)
• The AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables
• An IAM role for an Amazon ECS task
• An IAM role for Amazon EC2

To use credentials associated with a different named profile in the shared credentials file (~/.aws/credentials), you may set the AWS_PROFILE environment variable.

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper reads and supports some configuration options specified in the AWS shared configuration file (~/.aws/config). To disable these options, you must set the AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG environment variable to false. The supported options include:

• Assumed roles specified with role_arn and source_profile
• External credential processes specified with credential_process
• Web Identities like IAM Roles for Service Accounts in Kubernetes (Note: Kubernetes users using containers with a non-root user may encounter permission issues described in this bug and may need to employ a workaround adjusting the Kubernetes securityContext.)

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper uses the same credentials as the AWS CLI and the AWS SDKs. For more information about configuring AWS credentials, see Configuration and Credential Files in the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.

The credentials must have a policy applied that allows access to Amazon ECR.

Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper

Environment Variable	Sample Value	Description
AWS_ECR_DISABLE_CACHE	true	Disables the local file auth cache if set to a non-empty value
AWS_ECR_CACHE_DIR	~/.ecr	Specifies the local file auth cache directory location

Usage

docker pull 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-repository:my-tag

docker push 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-repository:my-tag

docker pull public.ecr.aws/amazonlinux/amazonlinux:latest

If you have configured additional profiles for use with the AWS CLI, you can use those profiles by specifying the AWS_PROFILE environment variable when invoking docker. For example:

AWS_PROFILE=myprofile docker pull 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-repository:my-tag

There is no need to use docker login or docker logout.

Troubleshooting

If you have previously authenticated with an ECR repository by using the docker login command manually then Docker may have stored an auth token which has since expired. Docker will continue to attempt to use that cached auth token instead of utilizing the credential helper. You must explicitly remove the previously cached expired token using docker logout 123456789012.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-repository. After that Docker will start utilizing the ECR credential helper to fetch fresh credentials, and you will no longer need to use docker login or docker logout.

Logs from the Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper are stored in ~/.ecr/log.

For more information about Amazon ECR, see the the Amazon Elastic Container Registry User Guide.

Experimental features

Features marked as experimental are optionally made available to users to test and provide feedback.

If you test any experimental feaures, you can give feedback via the feature's tracking issue regarding:

• Your experience with the feature
• Issues or problems
• Suggested improvements

Experimental features are incomplete in design and implementation. Backwards incompatible changes may be introduced at any time or support dropped entirely. Therefore experimental features are not recommended for use in production environments.

Security disclosures

If you think you’ve found a potential security issue, please do not post it in the Issues. Instead, please follow the instructions here or email AWS security directly.

License

The Amazon ECR Docker Credential Helper is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.