GitHub Container Registry Login from WSL2¶

First we need is an access token to authenticate to GitHub Packages. Make sure it has write:packages scope selected.
Set the token as an environment variable.

# It's temporary. Once the session is terminated, we will need to do it again. Make sure you have the token saved somewhere else to be referred later.
export GH_TOKEN=<Actual token here>

Login using the following command.

echo $GH_TOKEN | docker login ghcr.io -u USERNAME --password-stdin

If everything is fine, you will get Login Succeeded message.

But if you try to go for docker push, it will throw an error.

unauthorized: unauthenticated: User cannot be authenticated with the token provided.

If you view the content of ~/.docker/config.json, you will find the following.

{
        "auths": {
                "ghcr.io": {}
        },
        "credsStore": "desktop.exe"
}

As you can see, the auths are empty for ghcr.io.

To fix it, remove the credsStore key-value pair. And login again. This time, it will have the auth for ghcr.io