Unable to push helm chart to Quay registry prompts unexpected status: 401 UNAUTHORIZED

Environment

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
  • 4.x
• Red Hat Quay
  • 3.6.z
  • 3.7.z

Issue

• Helm push to QUAY registry gives Error: unexpected status: 401 UNAUTHORIZED

$ helm push etherpad-0.0.4.tgz oci://quayregistry.example.com/user1/helm
Error: unexpected status: 401 UNAUTHORIZED

Resolution

• Helm interprets repo by assuming that the repo used to push is the name of the chart.
• Example: Creating a chart named etherpad and then pushing to same repo etherpad works fine with robot account credentials.
• However, pushing to different repo sample with robot account credentials does not work because helm would interpret it as pushing to sample/etherpad which does not work because robot accounts generally do not have repo create permissions.

Diagnostic Steps

Steps to reproduce:

1. Created an organization called helm and create a robot account helm+helmrobot with repository etherpad

2. Login to QUAY registry quayregistry.example.com

bash-4.4$ helm registry login -u="helm+helmrobot" -p="Y5IWE3JPQH5UMWFJL78UJD4XEDTGP09UDV78PSZYM1E0WMHFI8SME1WS8F32D3YN" quayregistry.example.com
WARNING: Using --password via the CLI is insecure. Use --password-stdin.
Login Succeeded

3. Push to the QUAY registry

bash-4.4$ helm push ../helm-chart/etherpad-0.0.4.tgz  oci://quayregistry.example.com/helm
Pushed: quayregistry.example.com/helm/etherpad:0.0.4
Digest: sha256:506ea8be1cf22c3329f4b8c6b0e8db2d33572544133d4a8c5bab542c232496e2   <---- was successful push
bash-4.4$ 
- pushing to different repo other than the chart-name . created another repository "sample" and gave write permission. 
bash-4.4$ helm push ../helm-chart/etherpad-0.0.4.tgz  oci://quayregistry.example.com/helm/sample
Error: unexpected status: 401 UNAUTHORIZED <---- Was unsuccessful because robot account does not have permission to create repo "sample/etherpad".

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