Quay.io Will Require a Red Hat Account After July 31, 2021... Wait, What?

Update: The date has been pushed back to July 31, 2021

What’s This About?

At the end of June this year, we will be making a change to quay.io. We will transition the quay.io sign-up and login process to redhat.com exclusively. In other words, after July 31, 2021, you will need to have linked a Red Hat account to your quay.io account in order to log into the website.

We realize that this is a big ask of our community, in particular to those who have been faithful Quay users since we launched back in 2013. But this is an important step in the evolution of quay.io and we want to help you understand the reasoning behind it.

What’s Changing?

After July 31, 2021, the only way to log into the quay.io website will be through a Red Hat account. We will be removing the ability to log in with your current quay.io, Github or Google credentials.

Your current quay.io credentials will not be changed, however they will not be accepted to log into the site. Your quay.io credentials will still work fine with the ‘docker’ or ‘podman’ command line tools. Any existing robot accounts and tokens will also be unaffected. The change is only happening to how you authenticate to the quay.io website itself.

It’s important to understand that this means if you haven’t linked a Red Hat account to your quay.io account before July 31, 2021, you will not be able to log into the quay.io website.  Image push/pull will still work fine but you will be locked out of the site itself.

Note that nothing will change in terms of the Quay plans or service levels. Quay.io will remain a public registry with a free tier.

Why Are We Doing This?

Quay.io was the first private container registry on the internet, and since it launched in October 2013, we’ve become one of the largest sources of container images in the world. Hundreds of thousands of users depend on quay.io to support their development activities and run their businesses. Red Hat itself uses quay.io to host our product builds as well as to serve up the container images for many of our flagship products. We have worked tirelessly for the past few years to migrate quay.io onto Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated to help enable resiliency and performance as demand for container images has skyrocketed.

So while we’ve bolstered the backend of quay.io, it’s now time to turn our focus to the front end of our service. The quay.io experience today is not much changed from when it launched several years ago. In many ways this is a good thing, and our customers have told us they appreciate a stable user experience. However as a member of Red Hat’s hosted services family, quay.io can’t take advantage of existing support tools and processes without some changes. There are many services and benefits we want to extend to our quay.io users but cannot easily do so until we start to make quay.io look more like a Red Hat service. The first step on this journey is to get our user communities aligned.  

Once aligned, quay.io customers will have a more streamlined support experience and the door will be opened for new ways to buy and manage your quay.io plans. The current quay.io payment plan is based on credit cards only and we have had many customers ask for new ways to sign up and pay for plans. For our free customers, linking your quay.io account with a free Red Hat account will give you access to a wealth of Red Hat resources for Quay including Knowledge Base articles and documentation.

Additionally, there are many interesting ways we can tie quay.io into the overall customer experience of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, Code Ready Workspaces, and other hosted services to create a seamless experience. All of this begins with the task of bringing our quay.io customers into the Red Hat ecosystem.

What Do You Need To Do?

Follow the instructions in this knowledge base article. It takes just a few seconds to create a free (Personal) Red Hat Account and link it to your quay.io account. We’ll take it from there, and we’re here to help if you have any issues during the process.