FlightAware
Angle of Attack: How Hard is it to Delete a Docker Tag?
Chris Roberts
01 Apr 2024 • 8 min read
So how hard could deleting a little ol' Docker tag be? This is just the tag, mind you, not the underlying image itself. I would expect our periodic garbage collection to handle image deletion once there are no tags left referencing it. Well it turns out that the Docker Registry API specification entirely lacked a tag deletion endpoint until 2021. And even 3 years later, our Container Registry of choice, Distribution, hasn't yet landed the new endpoint in a stable release. With that…