Publish to GitHub Packages and GitHub Container Registry

3 minutes

Here, you'll learn the basics of using a workflow to publish to GitHub Packages, and the necessary steps to build, authenticate, tag, and push a Docker image to the GitHub Container Registry.

Use a workflow to publish to GitHub Packages

GitHub Packages let you securely publish and consume packages, store your packages alongside your code, and share your packages privately with your team or publicly with the open-source community. You can also use GitHub Actions to automate your packages.

Following is an example of a basic workflow that runs whenever a new release is created in a repository. If the tests pass, then the package is published to GitHub Packages.

name: Node.js Package

on:
  release:
    types: [created]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 12
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm test

  publish-gpr:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 12
          registry-url: https://npm.pkg.github.com/
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm publish
        env:
          NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}

First, the workflow file must exist in the .github/workflows directory. It's common practice to name a workflow that publishes a new package whenever a new release is created something like release-package.yml, to make it easy for project collaborators to understand its purpose without navigating to the workflow file.

The preceding workflow does a few things after a new release is created:

A job named build runs npm ci ("ci" for Continuous Integration) to install dependencies directly from the package-lock.json file, as well as the tests for the project.
Once the build job succeeds, the job named publish-gpr publishes the package.
The workflow publishes the package to the registry-url: https://npm.pkg.github.com/ using an access token for authentication.

Use GitHub Container Registry to host and manage Docker container images

GitHub Packages support the use of containers, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native technologies to manage their entire application lifecycle including production operations, development, release, and deployment. GitHub Packages also offers a container registry designed to support the unique needs of container images. You can use GitHub Container Registry to seamlessly host and manage Docker container images in your GitHub organization or personal user account. GitHub Container Registry allows you to configure who can manage and access packages using fine-grained permissions.

With the container registry, you can:

Store container images within your organization and user account rather than a repository.
Set fine-grained permissions for the container images.
Access public container images anonymously.

After you've built the image and authenticated and signed in to the GitHub Container Registry service at ghcr.io, you can then tag and push the latest version of the image to the container registry using these commands:

echo $GITHUB_TOKEN | docker login ghcr.io -u USERNAME --password-stdin

docker tag IMAGE_ID ghcr.io/OWNER/IMAGE_NAME:latest

docker push ghcr.io/OWNER/IMAGE_NAME:latest

Note

To authenticate using a GitHub Actions workflow, you can use a GITHUB_TOKEN:

For package registries at PACKAGE-REGISTRY.pkg.github.com.
For the container registry at ghcr.io/OWNER/IMAGE-NAME.

Continue

Use a workflow to publish to GitHub Packages

Use GitHub Container Registry to host and manage Docker container images

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