Friendly ping. I think it would be great to be able to use this myself when pushing to GHCR, and I'd at least love to get some feedback on the approach.

@imjasonh Sorry for the delay in taking a look at this. Mislav is no longer working at GitHub hence why this fell through the cracks a bit. After looking through the issue and at comments #5150 (comment) and #5150 (comment) I am not sure this is the right direction. I am aligned with what Mislav previously said. I think trying to set up symlinks for our users is not the right approach and that having a separate docker-credential-gh binary or script that users place in the correct directory is the direction we should be moving. There are too many edge cases and known broken cases with the symlink approach.

Having said that, I think we should introduce a gh auth docker-credential command (very similar to gh auth git-credential) that implements the docker credential helper protocol. From the docs it looks like a simple protocol so utilizing any of the docker scaffolding feels like overkill. This command should not do anything fancy with checking scopes or logging in, just be responsible for returning the token in the format that docker expects. This will allow our users to use a simple script like this in their path:

#!/bin/bash
# This "docker-credential-gh" utility should exist an as executable somewhere in PATH.
#
# Dependencies: gh
#
set -e
gh auth docker-credential $1

I can understand this is not an ideal solution as it does not do all the set up work for the user, but I do think it moves us in the right direction and makes it easier than it is now to use gh as a docker credential helper. What are your thoughts?

Going to close this due to lack of movement from the author.