How to use Docker Private Registry with Kubernetes

When you pull images from Docker Private Registry with native Docker, you can do the authentication with docker login. However, if you're using these images from Kubernetes, you can't run docker login command directly. You'll need to create a Secret Key instead as follows:

$ kubectl create secret docker-registry myregistrykey --docker-server=DOCKER_REGISTRY_SERVER --docker-username=DOCKER_USER --docker-password=DOCKER_PASSWORD --docker-email=DOCKER_EMAIL

You'll get a response like this:

secret "myregistrykey" created

Once it's done, you can specify the key for Pod definitions:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: foo
  namespace: awesomeapps
spec:
  containers:
    - name: foo
      image: janedoe/awesomeapp:v1
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: myregistrykey

Note:

I had a problem that kubectl describe pod ... says "Back-off pulling image "DOCKERREGISTRYSERVER/image:latest". I could fix it just by deleting the secret and creating it again. You can delete "myregistrykey" as follows:

$ kubectl delete secret myregistrykey