DockerFinder: Multi-attribute Search of Docker Images

Docker containers run from Docker images, which can be distributed through so-called Docker registries. The currently available support for searching images in registries is however limited. Available registries (e.g., Docker Hub) only permit searching images "by name", i.e. by specifying a term occurring in the image name, in the image description or in the name of the user that created such image. In this paper we try to enhance the support for discovering Docker images by introducing DockerFinder, a microservice-based prototype that permits searching for images based on multiple attributes, e.g., image name, image size, or supported software distributions. DockerFinder crawls images from a remote Docker registry, it automatically analyses such images to produce multi-attribute descriptions to be stored in a local repository, and it permits searching for images by querying the local repository.