Add search by tags to Image Repository
Problem to solve
When wanting to tag the latest and latest-of-a-branch docker registry tags, we have to get the last information from the registry. We can do this with by getting the tags or get the tags within a project API calls. Right now, both these calls list all tags, which is not only slow, it potentially also results in pagination. And while we could work around the pagination issue (get the project ID, tags_count, and set the results per page to tags_count on a second api call for the specific set of tags), this is error prone (exceeding the max page size etc) and expensive (bandwith CPU etc). Especially, when I really I am only interested in '^v3.' or '^v'.
Intended users
Personas are described at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas/
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
- Rachel (Release Manager)
User experience goal
Speed improvement for the user, developer improvement by getting more specific information.
Proposal
In !29763 (merged) the capability to add 'searching in the name' was added. Likewise, we should add the same for the 'tags' content. While having a full-regex in the search query would be nice, it would be hard to encode, so instead of a full search, a 'starts_with' like search would be more fruitful, this because many proper tags will likely start with a digit or a 'v', but many 'other' tags would be for intermediate runs that contains something like 'hash:pipelineID' and most often we'd be interested in a version match. This would potentially pave the way for adding a 'filter' field on the registry page (where even here, a starts_with like filter would not be bad at all).
Further details
Doing a full-on docker publishing, including tagging the 'latest' and 'v3.6' for a 'v3.6.2' for example would be then possible without having to do many expensive queries with lots of parsing.
But maybe more importantly, having this API, opens the way to add a 'search' function to the registry 'Image tags' page, just like there is on the 'Image repositories'
Documentation
Updating the container registry page accordingly.