Avoiding Docker Hub Rate Limits

On November 20, 2020, rate limits for anonymous and free authenticated use of Docker Hub went into effect. Anonymous and Free Docker Hub users are limited to 100 and 200 container image pull requests per six hours, respectively. Docker Pro and Docker Team accounts continue to have unlimited access to pull container images from Docker Hub.

For more information on rate limits, see Understanding Docker Hub rate limiting on the Docker website.

In app manager v1.44.0 and later, a Docker Hub username and password can be passed to the kots docker ensure-secret command, which creates an image pull secret that the admin console can use when pulling images to avoid rate limits. These credentials are only used to increase limits and do not need access to any private repositories on Docker Hub.

In app manager v1.69.0 and later, kots docker ensure-secret also applies the image pull secret to all Kubernetes manifests that have images. A new version, based on the latest version, is created in the admin console for this purpose.

Example:

kubectl kots docker ensure-secret --dockerhub-username sentrypro --dockerhub-password password --namespace sentry-pro

For more information, see docker ensure-secret in the kots CLI documentation.