Use search to quickly find and discover images hosted in the GitLab Container Registry

Problem to solve

As a development team that publishes many images using GitLab CI/CD, when we need to find an image, we need the ability to search by image name in the Container Registry UI, so that we can quickly find the image and correlated metadata we are looking for.

Intended users

• Delaney (Development Team Lead)
• Sasha (Software Developer)
• Devon (DevOps Engineer)
• Sidney (Systems Administrator)
• Rachel (Release Manager)
• Simone (Software Engineer in Test)
• Allison (Application Ops)

User experience goal

• The user should be able to quickly find any images matching a specific name. A common use case is to search for images that contain Release or Master or a given Commit_SHA

Proposal

Give users of the GitLab Container Registry the ability to search for images by name in the project and group-level container registries.

Further details

Permissions and Security

• There are no permissions updates needed for this change.

Documentation

• Update https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/#control-container-registry-from-within-gitlab

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

• For GitLab, we would like to see an increased usage of the Container Registry UI. We'd like to drive more users to the app for discovering and managing images.
• For our users, success looks like when they want to find a specific image to validate that it was built correctly or troubleshoot when something has gone wrong, it's fast and easy.

New metrics

• Count the total number of searches at the project and group-level
• Capture a list of search terms