Cascade is an OCI Registry built with CNCF Distribution on top of NATS.

The purpose of Cascade is to be a replicated OCI Registry that is easy to run. As of writing, all other OCI registries rely on object storage for replication. Not ideal for environments that don't run in the cloud, or have limited resources. Self-hosted S3 implementations also tend to be quite difficult to operate, or are not lightweight. Cascade aims to solve this by using NATS Object Store as its storage layer, and eventually by having the ability to operate NATS itself through a custom controller.

There are binaries available on the Releases page.

Container images are available as well:

podman pull ghcr.io/robinkb/cascade:<version>

Or you can compile Cascade yourself with go install:

go install github.com/robinkb/cascade/cmd/cascade@latest

You can quickly run Cascade with the NATS and Cascade binaries:

# Run the NATS server.
nats-server --jetstream
# Run Cascade with the example configuration.
cascade serve cmd/cascade/config-dev.yaml

You can now push images to localhost:5000.

Cascade is built on CNCF Distribution, and supports the same features as Distribution. You can refer to Distribution's documentation for more configuration details. The only difference is that Cascade only supports the NATS storage backend that it was built for. If you need other storage backends, you are likely better off using any of the other commonly-used registries.

NATS supports a very wide variety of deployment options. Setting up NATS is far beyond the scope of this documentation. Please refer to the NATS documentation for deployment details.

Cascade is Apache 2.0 licensed and accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. Please see the contributing guide for more information.