Bitbucket Container Registry Does Not Support Docker Tag Listing Endpoint

[Seun Ore]

Summary

The Bitbucket Container Registry (crg.apkg.io) does not support the standard Docker Registry V2 tag listing endpoint (/v2/<repository>/tags/list), returning HTTP 405 Method Not Allowed.
This prevents compatibility with widely used tooling that relies on tag enumeration, such as Argo CD Image Updater and other GitOps automation tools.

Environment

• Registry: Bitbucket Container Registry

• Registry URL: https://crg.apkg.io

• Image Format: OCI / Docker V2

• Authentication: API token (Docker kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson)

• Client: Argo CD Image Updater v1.0.1

• Server Version: v1.33.6+rke2r1

Actual behaviour

GET /v2/company-name/image-name/tags/list

Response:
HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
{
"timestamp": "2025-12-25T18:06:12.036+00:00",
"status": 405,
"error": "Method Not Allowed",
"path": "/v2/company-name/image-name/tags/list"
}

Expected Behaviour
GET /v2/company-name/image-name/tags/list

Any solution for this? Not interested in changing to digest tag pattern.

[Ben · Accepted solution]

Hi Seun,

May I know if you've read our documentation concerning packages?

• https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/getting-started-with-packages/

There is a line here which explains why you are encountering the issue, packages does not support the format you are expecting:

• Bitbucket container registry is not 100% compatible with the Open Container Initiative, specifically we don’t support direct DELETE API calls and the tags APIs.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround at this stage. I've raised a feature request on your behalf with our developers accordingly. Please feel free to Watch this for future updates and Vote for it to receive future updates related to it:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-23954 

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

[Seun Ore]

Thank you @Ben

I have abandoned argocd image updater for this reason. And especially thank you for creating a feature request for this. It will be great to see a full OCI support not only for container images but also all kinds of artifacts including helm.

[Arsalan Saleem]

Nice 

[Ryan Cole]

This is a tricky one. The Bitbucket Container Registry not supporting the standard tag listing endpoint is a limitation that a lot of GitOps tools run into.

One approach I’ve seen people take is to work around it by caching or listing tags through the registry API in batches, rather than relying on the standard endpoint. It adds a bit of overhead, but it keeps automation tools like Argo CD Image Updater functioning without changing your tagging strategy.

It’s essentially a bottleneck in the standard workflow (you can confirm it using any bottleneck calculator like this one), so any solution involves either adjusting the pipeline logic or introducing a small adapter layer to enumerate tags safely.

[Seun Ore]

I found it too manual as we do lots of releases daily. I had used harbor to store all my artifacts but I would not expose harbour via ingress to bitbucket for continuous image updates. The environment is semi air-gapped