What do most folks do when utilizing containerd as the container engine for the cluster local registry?

Not sure what you mean by "cluster local registry", but you don't necessarily need a registry at all: you can build images directly inside the Kubernetes namespace with

nerdctl -n <http://k8s.io|k8s.io> build ...

and reference them from your pod specs. However you must make sure to set the image pull policy to

Never

if you use the

latest

tag to prevent kubelet from trying to fetch a newer image.

Hi, @fast-garage-66093, thank you for the reply. I’m specifically working on how to utilize tilt (tilt.dev) to setup a local development environment on top of rancher desktop.

Ah, ok. I have never used Tilt, so I don't know, but I guess it needs a local registry to push to? You can definitely run a registry as a container and use that from within the cluster.

For now, I’ve swapped back to using dockerd/moby instead of containerd … but … to continue the discussion to maybe figure out what would be needed for containerd … one of the tilt folks was suggesting that I needed a way to get the built image “into the cluster”…

I have written some bats tests for Rancher Desktop that deploys an internal registry for testing registry access with credentials. It may be a bit complex, but could give you an idea on what can be done: https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/blob/main/bats/tests/registry/creds.bats

Thanks for this, Jan. This is helping me to see the pieces and how they come together.