Container Registry is deprecated and scheduled for shutdown. Effective May 15, 2024, Artifact Registry hosts images for the gcr.io domain in projects without previous Container Registry usage. After March 18, 2025, Container Registry will be shut down.

To get started with managing containers on Google Cloud, use Artifact Registry. If you use Container Registry, learn how to transition to Artifact Registry to manage your containers on Google Cloud.

For more information on the deprecation and shutdown, see the deprecations page and release notes.

Container Registry deprecation

Effective May 15, 2023, Container Registry is deprecated and scheduled for shutdown. Container Registry is superseded by Artifact Registry.

We are taking the following phased approach to discontinuing Container Registry:

Effective January 8, 2024, in organizations that haven't used Container Registry before, and in projects that don't belong to organizations, all new gcr.io repositories are hosted on Artifact Registry by default.
After May 15, 2024, Google Cloud projects without previous usage of Container Registry only support gcr.io repositories hosted in Artifact Registry.

This change affects:
- Newly created projects.
- Existing projects where you have not pushed an image to Container Registry.

When you enable the Artifact Registry API in projects without previous Container Registry usage, you can create gcr.io repositories in Artifact Registry and Artifact Registry redirects requests to the gcr.io domain to the appropriate Artifact Registry repository.

Container Registry is still available in projects where either of the following actions occurred before May 15, 2024:

You enabled the Container Registry API.
You pushed an image to a registry host in the project.

Container Registry shutdown

The shutdown is scheduled as follows:

After March 18, 2025, writing images to Container Registry is unavailable.
After April 22, 2025, reading images from Container Registry is unavailable. Existing images in Container Registry are inaccessible.
After May 22, 2025 all requests to gcr.io endpoints are served by Artifact Registry. Any existing images in Container Registry that haven't been copied to Artifact Registry won't be available in Artifact Registry. The Artifact Registry API must be enabled to serve gcr.io endpoint requests.

Prepare to transition to Artifact Registry

Depending on how you configure and use Container Registry, you might need to perform some configuration steps to prepare a new project to successfully handle requests to the gcr.io domain. For example, principals that access the repositories must have an appropriate Artifact Registry role or a role with equivalent permissions.

We recommend that you:

Test and verify your existing Container Registry workflows work with Artifact Registry before May 15, 2024. You can set up gcr.io domain support in a test project to confirm that existing automation and integration with services such as Cloud Build, Google Kubernetes Engine, or Cloud Run functions work as expected. If issues occur, you can reroute gcr.io traffic back to Container Registry and make the required changes to address the issue.
Transition projects with active Container Registry to Artifact Registry repositories. See Transition from Container Registry to learn about feature differences and transition options.
Prepare projects where you are not actively using Container Registry, but expect to set up a registry in the future. See Prepare for gcr.io hosted on Artifact Registry by default.

Use our transition tooling

Use the following tools to check which projects have Container Registry usage, copy images from Container Registry to Artifact Registry, and automatically migrate multiple projects from Container Registry to Artifact Registry.

Check Container Registry usage.
Use our migration tool to migrate projects from Container Registry to Artifact Registry, copy images, and select your preferred transition repository type.
Copy images from Container Registry to Artifact Registry using the automatic migration tool's copy feature, gcrane, Docker, or the gcloud CLI.

We will continue to communicate changes to the service in accordance with the Google Cloud terms of service.