The package registry package size is very large.

[al-ah]

Description

Hi,

According to this document: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/fleet/current/air-gapped.html
I ran the following commands to be able to use the package registry offline:

docker pull docker.elastic.co/package-registry/distribution:8.17.2

docker save -o package-registry-8.17.2.tar docker.elastic.co/package-registry/distribution:8.17.2

The biggest problem is that it is very large, almost 20 GB:

Worse, when you want to make the system usable offline on Docker, you need three times the space, 60 GB (20 GB for copying the package-registry-8.17.2.tar file, 20 GB for loading the image into Docker, 20 GB for creating the Docker container)
While its size for version 8.10.3, which is almost 15 months ago, was only 7.7 GB.

Why does it have to be so large? Is it needed at all? Will the size continue to increase in the future?

I think a fundamental and better solution is needed.

Thanks

[pxsalehi]

Please open an issue on https://github.com/elastic/package-registry rather than here. Thanks.

[pxsalehi]

nvm. I can transfer it.

[jsoriano]

Hey @al-ah, thanks for your request.

Why does it have to be so large? Is it needed at all? Will the size continue to increase in the future?

At the moment it contains [almost] all versions of all packages ever published. With the current design it can only increase over time.

There are also "lite" images, but they only contain a selection of packages, the one for 8.17.2 is docker.elastic.co/package-registry/distribution:lite-8.17.2.

We have plans to improve this situation, on one side with images with reduced sets of packages, and on the other side providing tools to customize images. See for example #724.

As a temporary workaround, if you are certain about the packages you use, you can download them with their signatures from https://epr.elastic.co, and serve them from a vanilla package registry.

For example the latest apache package and its signature can be downloaded from:

• https://epr.elastic.co/epr/apache/apache-1.29.1.zip
• https://epr.elastic.co/epr/apache/apache-1.29.1.zip.sig

Latest vanilla package registry is tagged as docker.elastic.co/package-registry/package-registry:v1.27.0.

Find more examples about running package registry with docker in https://github.com/elastic/package-registry?tab=readme-ov-file#docker.

I think a fundamental and better solution is needed.

Agree, we will try to dedicate some time to this.

[fred-maussion]

I had a similar request from several customers and ending up generating operating system packages (rpm, deb, tar.gz) automatically based on the latest releases from the upstream repository.
The overall footprint is ~26Mo and can be used with the proxymode to grab the packages from epr.elastic.co.

In case it that can help the community.
https://github.com/fred-maussion/community_elastic-package-registry/releases