How to pull docker images hosted on Google Container Registry via Kubernetes (kubernetes included on docker for desktop)

Question

I am having trouble pulling images from GCR ( pulled by my deployments ) I got ImagePullBackOff error.

I have followed this tutorial already, step by step.

https://container-solutions.com/using-google-container-registry-with-kubernetes/

However it doesn't seem to work for me. I have even tried using the Storage Admin role when creating the service account key but its still no use.

When describing the pod, I got this error:

  Warning  Failed                 14s (x2 over 30s)  kubelet, docker-for-desktop  Failed to pull image "gcr.io/<project-name>/<image-name>": rpc error: code = Unknown desc = Error response from daemon: Get https://gcr.io/v2/<project-name>/<image-name>/manifests/latest: unknown: Unable to parse json key.
  Warning  Failed                 14s (x2 over 30s)  kubelet, docker-for-desktop  Error: ErrImagePull
  Normal   BackOff                2s (x3 over 29s)   kubelet, docker-for-desktop  Back-off pulling image "gcr.io/<project-name>/<image-name>"
  Warning  Failed                 2s (x3 over 29s)   kubelet, docker-for-desktop  Error: ImagePullBackOff

When visiting the https://gcr.io/v2/project-name/image-name/manifests/latest url, I got this:

// 20181124152036
// https://gcr.io/v2/project-name/image-name/manifests/latest

{
  "errors": Array[1][
    {
      "code": "UNAUTHORIZED",
      "message": "You don't have the needed permissions to perform this operation, and you may have invalid credentials. To authenticate your request, follow the steps in: https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/docs/advanced-authentication"
    }
  ]
}

Pod Definition:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: microservice-1-deployment
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: microservice-1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: microservice-1
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: microservice-1
          image: gcr.io/project-name/image-name
          ports:
            - containerPort: 80

Notes:

My deployments are able to pull images when they where hosted on docker hub, issue only occurs on pulling images in GCR.

Env

• Windows 10
• Docker Version 2.0.0.0-win78 (28905)
• Kubernetes 1.10.3 (Included on docker for desktop)

I hope you can help me on this,

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

OK found the culprit, it has something to do with Powershell and Command Prompt.

I switched to using Git Bash and followed the same instructions in this tutorial

https://container-solutions.com/using-google-container-registry-with-kubernetes/

and it worked!

Probably the culprit occurred when creating imagePullSecrets on Powershell and/or Command Prompt. Something probably went wrong when reading the json file, related to encoding or something.

Hope this helps anyone.