Why imglife?

imglife turns Docker image management from a patchwork of fragile scripts and tribal conventions into a declarative, auditable, industrial-grade system — one YAML, one binary.

The four structural problems

Any organization running Docker at scale eventually hits the same four pain points:

Dependency on public registries — Docker Hub rate limits, images silently removed, unpatched CVEs.
Base image drift — every team rebuilds its own Dockerfiles: inconsistency, duplication, security gaps.
Registry sprawl — tags never purged, storage costs drifting, impossible to tell what’s actually used.
Lack of traceability — which app uses which base? which version? is it EOL?

imglife addresses all four with a single tool and a single YAML file, instead of stitching together four or five heterogeneous tools (Skopeo + Harbor policies + bash scripts + homegrown dashboards).

Benefits by role

Application developer

You want to ship code, not maintain Dockerfiles.

One less Dockerfile to maintain — consume a validated base from the platform and focus on your application.
Faster, more reliable CI — internal pulls (no Docker Hub rate limits), bases already cached close to your runners.
Immediate feedback if your base is outdated — imglife check fails your pipeline before an outdated runtime reaches production.
No coordination overhead — when the platform patches a base, you pick it up at your next build.

Platform / DevOps team

You’re responsible for the organization’s image hygiene.

Enforceable standardization — Dockerfile templates become the single contract for every org image.
Cascading updates — patch a base, all applicative projects detect it on their next build, no broadcast email required.
Measurable time savings — managing 50+ images (sync, tag, purge, docs) drops from hours per week to near-zero once the YAML is written.
Config-as-code — the YAML lives in Git, reviewed via MR, with full history and trivial rollback.

Security / CISO

You need to prove the supply chain is under control.

Reduced attack surface — one single, audited entry path for external images.
Automatic EOL tracking — alert before a critical CVE lands on an unsupported version, via endoflife.date integration.
Credentials outside configuration — the YAML can live in Git in the clear; tokens stay in the CI vault.
End-to-end traceability — build records in the Package Registry — useful for SOC 2 / ISO 27001 audits.

Engineering leadership / FinOps

You care about the organization’s bottom line.

Controlled storage costs — automatic retention (cleanup, app purge) keeps the registry from growing into a 2 TB monster.
Reduced human cost — no in-house project to keep alive (bash scripts, custom Terraform, homegrown dashboards).
Short time-to-value — one YAML file, one GitLab pipeline, and it’s running. No heavy platform to install.
Low lock-in — provider-agnostic: GitLab, Gitea, Docker Hub, any OCI registry.

Structural advantages

Advantage	Concrete consequence
Config-as-code (single YAML)	Review via MR, Git history, trivial rollback
Three-tier (mirror/base/app)	Separates responsibilities → fewer inter-team conflicts
Stateless & idempotent	Replaying a pipeline is safe, no hidden drift
Extensible hooks	Integrates with existing tooling (Slack, Jira, Cosign signing)
Provider-agnostic	GitLab, Gitea, Docker Hub, generic OCI registries

What you get vs. rolling your own

Guaranteed consistency across sync, build, cleanup, and status — no windows where a tag exists without a build record.
Batched Docker Hub API calls (tags + dates in a single request) — the kind of optimization rarely done in an in-house script.
Exponential retry built in everywhere — network resilience without custom code.
Bilingual documentation — adoptable in mixed EN/FR teams without friction.

What imglife is not

Being explicit about the boundary is a feature:

It is not a vulnerability scanner — pair with Trivy or Grype.
It is not a registry — it orchestrates, it does not store.
It is not a native signing tool — but hooks let you plug Cosign into the pipeline.

imglife does one thing, well, and integrates with the rest of your stack.

One-sentence summary

imglife makes Docker image management declarative, auditable, and industrial-grade, with a low adoption cost and fast ROI as soon as you manage more than ~10 images.