Slow but steady: Artifact Hub reaches milestone by adding container image support

Slow but steady: Artifact Hub reaches milestone by adding container image support

Artifact Hub, a web app for finding, installing, and publishing Kubernetes packages, has made a huge step towards its creators’ aim of becoming the central hub for all things cloud native by finally offering experimental support for container images.

The feature was probably the most sought after missing element of the open source project and can now be found in the just released Artifact Hub 1.6. Its addition completes the list of most popular shareables in the Hub’s catalogue which also includes artifacts such as Helm charts, OPA policies, OLM operators, Tekton pipelines, and Helm/kubectl/CoreDNS plugins.

Artifact Hub was started in 2020 in a bid to counteract the fragmentation of the cloud native artifact space, which was propelled by the appearances of all sorts of registries for various artifacts. The project’s ultimate goals are therefore to provide project maintainers with a central instance to push packages to instead of having to serve and update content on multiple platforms, as well as give users an easy way to find whatever component they need for their respective systems. 

Since its inception, Artifact Hub has become part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s sandbox and could chalk up some wins like becoming the home of Helm charts, as the link on the official Helm page now forwards users to the Hub for finding appropriate (though sometimes somewhat stale) content. Supporting container images could mean wider adoption for the project, as for instance the rate limits introduced by container image library Docker Hub in late 2020 keep coming up as a pain point for various use cases.

Artifact Hub 1.6 also comes with a couple of security updates (mostly in the form of dependency updates) and introduces package view graphs for stats pages. Seasoned users will also appreciate the newly added dark mode for documentation as well as the improvements to repository search endpoint performance and tracker panic handling. Details are available via the Artifact Hub changelog.