Release 1.6.0

Helm charts management

Motivations

Helm has become the de facto package manager of Kubernetes which is the primary container orchestration and running platform now. More and more applications are deployed with helm charts. Obviously, a dedicated helm chart repository is a MUST-HAVE system to build the enterprise IT infrastructure and platforms. Building capabilities to serve the cloud-native environments represented by Kubernetes has already become an inevitable thing. What's more, helm charts should work together with container images and Harbor has rich experiences and many advantages in image management. And then supporting both image management and helm chart management is becoming a natural direction.

Main features

From V1.6.0, harbor can behavior as a unified cloud-native registry to both serve image management requests and helm chart management requests. The main features are grouped into two perspectives:

Overall:
- Charts are isolated by project namespace
- Access control is applied to charts by RBAC
User management portal:
- List all the charts under the specified project namespace with list or card view
- List all the chart versions of one specified chart with list or card view
- Show the details of the specified chart version
  - README content and other metadata information
  - The signature prov file status
  - Usage commands reference
  - The dependencies of the chart version
  - The value file content with the key-value view and yaml view
- Upload chart w/ prov file
- Download the specified chart version
- Delete the specified chart version
Work with Helm CLI:
- Use helm repo add to add harbor as a unified chart repository with specified username, all the project namespaces accessible by that user should be visible to helm.
- Use helm repo add to add a harbor project as a separate chart repository, only the charts under that project are visible to helm.
- Use push plugin of helm command to push chart to harbor
- Use helm install to download the chart from harbor and install it to the target Kubernetes
- Other helm commands like 'helm search' or 'helm verify' are also supported well

Benefits to users

Cover both image management and helm chart management with one unified powerful cloud-native registry. Avoid spending efforts to introduce a new system in and reduce the system maintenance cost in future. In addition, image and helm chart managements follow the similar user experiences, that will definitely reduce the new system learning efforts. What's more, managing helm charts and images in one system leave enough space and flexibilities for collaborations/integration in the future.

LDAP group supporting

Motivations

There are many Harbor administrator using LDAP to authenticate Harbor user, but Harbor administrators need to assign role to each users, and harbor administrators themselves should also be a group. it is not feasible to assign role for each person in a large organization.

Main features

Assign role to LDAP group: Administrator can add user member or group member, the group member can be imported from LDAP server by group DN. the LDAP user in this group can have the group's role.
Define harbor admin group DN: After define the harbor group admin, all LDAP user in this group have harbor administrator privileges.

Benefits to users

Simplify the Harbor user privilege management with LDAP group.

Replicate images with label filters

Motivations

Two replication filters(repository name filter and repository tag filter) have been introduced in the previous version of Harbor, they both need the filter pattern can match all the images which should be replicated. Sometimes this is difficult or even impossible. By label filter, Users can add any label to the images without changing the name of them.

Main features

Users replicate images by adding labels to them and creating a new rule with the label filter.

Benefits to users

The label filter provides a flexible way to replicate images.

Migrate multiple database to one unified PostgreSQL database

Motivations

In the previous releases, there are two or three database instances running into one Harbor node, which are Maria/Mysql and Postgresql. Obviously, it costs double/triple effort to maintain two/three types of databases. Merge multiple databases into a single database, making it far easier to keep things straight and make it possible to enable HA solution for the future Helm Chart release.

Main features

Migrate Harbor DB to Postgresql
Migrate Notary DB to Postgresql
Redirect Clair DB to Harbor/Notary DB

Benefits to users

Avoid spending efforts to manage/maintain two/three types of database in one Harbor instance.