How to Create an AWS ECR Repository in AWS CLI

If you need to create an Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Repository from the AWS CLI, you can do the following:

aws ecr create-repository \
--repository-name <repo-name> \
--image-scanning-configuration scanOnPush=true \
--region ${AWS_REGION}

I include scanOnPush=true by default since it automatically scans images for known vulnerabilities when they’re pushed — there’s no extra cost for this and it catches common CVEs early. You’ll want one repository per microservice or application component.

ECR repositories are region-specific, so if you deploy to multiple regions you’ll need to create repos in each one and set up cross-region replication. You can also add a lifecycle policy to automatically clean up old images and keep storage costs down.