How to add GitLab Registry to Dokploy?

Sergei Polovodov — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:07:31 +0000

For Febrary 2025, official wiki doesn’t have any information about GitLab registry support, LLMs don’t know any way to make it work as well, but… it’s possible and it works.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know why we use the registry. You can skip the long part and scroll down to the instructions.

What is docker registry?

It is a storage with our ready docker images.

We build once and use prepared images anytime. We don’t have to waste time and resources for building our image each time on each new machine for each deploy.

Registry is like… a freezer with infinite pizza. Cook once — take out as many times as you want. Same pizza. Every time.
You don’t wait, you don’t worry — just grab and go.

Build every time costs you at least two things:
Time - because every deploy is a cooking session.
Consistency - because every cooking session is a little different.

Same recipe, but different hands or different day sometimes can give you different result. And that’s a problem.

Why we need registry?

As I already mentioned, registry helps us to store built docker images of your apps without rebuilding build of them for each deploy from sources.
The one of main advantages is consistency. Immutable artifact. (build once, run anywhere, remember?

You always have exactly the same artifact, which means you can be sure that what you tested is exactly what you deployed. Everything else follows from this:

Speed. Skip build step on deploy. Just pull and run.
Low server load. Your build runs on GitLab Runner. The build process can’t affect your app server at all.
Simple rollback. Older versions are always there, just pull a previous tag.
Security. Small bonus. Source code never touches the production server.

In the end, this is the industry standard. The big guys do it this way for a reason.

P.S. It’s worth noting that an image might be built for the wrong platform, but this is usually caught and fixed during the initial setup — or solved entirely by using multi-platform builds. Also, for true immutability, it’s better to pin versions by digest rather than by tag, since tags can technically be overwritten.