Develop a custom container registry

Learning how to develop a custom container registry.

Before diving into the specifics of this component type, it is beneficial to familiarize yourself with our general guide to writing custom component flavors in ZenML. This guide provides an essential understanding of ZenML's component flavor concepts.

Base Abstraction

In the current version of ZenML, container registries have a rather basic base abstraction. In essence, their base configuration only features a uri and their implementation features a non-abstract prepare_image_push method for validation.

from abc import abstractmethod
from typing import Type

from zenml.enums import StackComponentType
from zenml.stack import Flavor
from zenml.stack.authentication_mixin import (
    AuthenticationConfigMixin,
    AuthenticationMixin,
)


class BaseContainerRegistryConfig(AuthenticationConfigMixin):
    """Base config for a container registry."""

    uri: str


class BaseContainerRegistry(AuthenticationMixin):
    """Base class for all ZenML container registries."""

    def prepare_image_push(self, image_name: str) -> None:
        """Conduct necessary checks/preparations before an image gets pushed."""

class BaseContainerRegistryFlavor(Flavor):
    """Base flavor for container registries."""

    @property
    @abstractmethod
    def name(self) -> str:
        """Returns the name of the flavor."""

    @property
    def type(self) -> StackComponentType:
        """Returns the flavor type."""
        return StackComponentType.CONTAINER_REGISTRY

    @property
    def config_class(self) -> Type[BaseContainerRegistryConfig]:
        """Config class for this flavor."""
        return BaseContainerRegistryConfig

    @property
    def implementation_class(self) -> Type[BaseContainerRegistry]:
        """Implementation class."""
        return BaseContainerRegistry

This is a slimmed-down version of the base implementation which aims to highlight the abstraction layer. In order to see the full implementation and get the complete docstrings, please check the SDK docs .

Building your own container registry

If you want to create your own custom flavor for a container registry, you can follow the following steps:

1. Create a class that inherits from the BaseContainerRegistry class and if you need to execute any checks/validation before the image gets pushed, you can define these operations in the prepare_image_push method. As an example, you can check the AWSContainerRegistry.
2. If you need further configuration, you can create a class which inherits from the BaseContainerRegistryConfig class.
3. Bring both the implementation and the configuration together by inheriting from the BaseContainerRegistryFlavor class.

Once you are done with the implementation, you can register it through the CLI. Please ensure you point to the flavor class via dot notation:

zenml container-registry flavor register <path.to.MyContainerRegistryFlavor>

For example, your flavor class MyContainerRegistryFlavor is defined in flavors/my_flavor.py, you'd register it by doing:

zenml container-registry flavor register flavors.my_flavor.MyContainerRegistryFlavor

ZenML resolves the flavor class by taking the path where you initialized zenml (via zenml init) as the starting point of resolution. Therefore, please ensure you follow the best practice of initializing zenml at the root of your repository.

If ZenML does not find an initialized ZenML repository in any parent directory, it will default to the current working directory, but usually it's better to not have to rely on this mechanism, and initialize zenml at the root.

Afterward, you should see the new flavor in the list of available flavors:

zenml container-registry flavor list

It is important to draw attention to when and how these base abstractions are coming into play in a ZenML workflow.

• The CustomContainerRegistryFlavor class is imported and utilized upon the creation of the custom flavor through the CLI.
• The CustomContainerRegistryConfig class is imported when someone tries to register/update a stack component with this custom flavor. Especially, during the registration process of the stack component, the config will be used to validate the values given by the user. As Config object are inherently pydantic objects, you can also add your own custom validators here.
• The CustomContainerRegistry only comes into play when the component is ultimately in use.

The design behind this interaction lets us separate the configuration of the flavor from its implementation. This way we can register flavors and components even when the major dependencies behind their implementation are not installed in our local setting (assuming the CustomContainerRegistryFlavor and the CustomContainerRegistryConfig are implemented in a different module/path than the actual CustomContainerRegistry).