Update (October 13th): The encoding mismatch is made on purpose as described in this issue. The current work is present in this repo.

So I needed to get a digest of a manifest. Manifest is a text file in JSON format which contains metadata for a docker image. Manifest is part of v2 docker registry API.

We want to have this functionality (f(manifest) → digest) in pulp so I needed to do that in python. I guess it would pretty easy to do in Go because I would be able to use code from distribution directly.

Former work was present in this gist.

It would have been pretty easy to do, since you just need to compute sha256 hash sum of the manifest. Compute a sum you say? That’s a one-liner. Except:

• you need to remove signatures section
• indentation and whitespace needs to stay (!)
• order matters (you need to serialize into OrderedDict)
• and most importantly, encoding is messed up

Let’s try the latter one. We’ll use this dockerfile:

FROM busybox
MAINTAINER My name is wéířĎ "cuz' I like that" <mail@example.com>
LABEL a=ý

What an ugly dockerfile!

$ docker build --tag=ugly .
...
$ docker run --net=host -v ~/registry:/var/lib/registry --name=registry registry:2
$ docker tag ugly localhost:5000/ugly
$ docker push localhost:5000/ugly
...
latest: digest: sha256:c77d17555213bd215cf3ed079c7a45d05ac859f7fb323a36d8ad0f793adc2453 size: 8807

Neat! It’s in distribution now. Let’s see the manifest:

$ curl http://localhost:5000/v2/ugly/manifests/sha256:c77d17555213bd215cf3ed079c7a45d05ac859f7fb323a36d8ad0f793adc2453
{
   "schemaVersion": 1,
   "name": "ugly",
   "tag": "latest",
...

Yep. It’s manifest. Time to check those weird characters:

...
Build\":[],\"Labels\":{\"a\":\"ý\"}},
\"docker_version\":\"1.9.0-dev-fc24\",
\"author\":\"My name is wéířĎ \\\"cuz' I like that\\\" \\u003cmail@example.com\"
...

Eiwwww. What’s that? I typed ý, not ý. And why < and > are written as unicode? What about docker history?

$ docker history --no-trunc ugly
IMAGE          CREATED         CREATED BY                                                                           SIZE
a1480b88c753   7 minutes ago   /bin/sh -c #(nop) LABEL a=ý                                                    0 B
99b012efab6a   7 minutes ago   /bin/sh -c #(nop) MAINTAINER My name is wéířĎ "cuz' I like that" <mail@example.com   0 B

That’s better, but the label still looks pretty bad.

I have created upstream issue for distribution and another one for engine.