Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Public repository policies

Amazon ECR uses resource-based permissions to control access to public repositories. When a public repository is created, it is publicly visible on the Amazon ECR Public Gallery and anyone can pull images from the repository. By default however, only the repository owner has access to push to the repository. With resource-based permissions, you specify which users, or roles have access to push to a public repository and what additional actions they can perform on it. You can apply a policy document to allow additional permissions to your repository.

Repository policies vs IAM policies

Amazon ECR public repository policies are a subset of IAM policies that are both scoped for and specifically used for controlling access to individual Amazon ECR repositories. In general, you use IAM policies to apply permissions for the entire Amazon ECR service. However, you can also use IAM policies to control access to specific resources.

For determining which actions a specific IAM user or role might perform on a repository, you use both Amazon ECR repository policies and IAM policies. If a user or role is allowed to perform an action through a repository policy but is denied permission through an IAM policy, the action is denied. Similarly, if a user or role is denied permission through an IAM policy even though that identity is allowed to perform an action, the action is denied. You can grant a user or role permission for an action through either a repository policy or an IAM policy, but you can't grant permission both ways.

You can use either of these policy types to control access to your public repositories, as shown in the following examples.

This example shows an Amazon ECR public repository policy, which allows for a specific IAM user to describe the repository and the images within the repository.

{
  "Version": "2008-10-17",
  "Statement": [{
    "Sid": "ECR Public Repository Policy",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Principal": {
      "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::account-id:user/username"
    },
    "Action": [
       "ecr-public:DescribeImages",
       "ecr-public:DescribeRepositories"
    ]
  }]
}

This example shows an IAM policy that achieves the same goal as the preceding example. In this example, the policy is scoped to a public repository (specified by the full Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the public repository) using the resource parameter. For more information about ARN format, see Resources.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [{
    "Sid": "ECR Public Repository Policy",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Principal": {
      "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::account-id:user/username"
    },
    "Action": [
      "ecr-public:DescribeImages",
      "ecr-public:DescribeRepositories"
    ],
    "Resource": [
      "arn:aws:ecr-public::account-id:repository/repository-name"
    ]
    }]
}