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opencontainers
distribution-spec
Go2018–2025
opencontainers / distribution-spec

distribution-spec

OCI Distribution Specification

Systems & InfrastructureLearning & ReferenceDevOps & Cloud
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9Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

OCI Distribution Specification

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-06-13 23:05:38 UTC to 2025-09-17 01:24:52 UTC.

012342018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

11 sources
westurner·Sep 17, 2025
Containerd/nerdctl supports a number of snapshotter plugins: Nydus, e Stargz, SOCI: Seekable OCI, fuse-overlayfs; containerd/stargz-snapshotter: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter containerd/nerdctl//docs/nydus.md: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/nydus.m... : nydusify and Check Nydus image: https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/blob/master/docs/nydus... : > Nydusify provides a checker to validate Nydus image, the checklist includes image manifest, Nydus bootstrap, file metadata, and data consistency in rootfs with the original OCI image. Meanwhile, the checker dumps OCI & Nydus image information to output (default) directory. nydus: https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus awslabs/soci-snapshotter: https://github.com/awslabs/soci-snapshotter ; lazy start standard OCI images /? lxc copy on write: https://
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www.google.com/search?q=lxc+copy+on+write : lxc-copy supports btrfs, zfs, lvm, overlayfs lxc/incus: "Add OCI image support" https://github.com/lxc/incus/issues/908 opencontainers/image-spec; OCI Image spec: https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec opencontainers/distribution-spec; OCI Image distribution spec: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec But then in the opencontainers/runtime-spec//config.md OCI runtime spec TODO bundle config.json there is an example of a config.json https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/con... The LXC approach is to run systemd in the container. The quadlet approach is to not run systemd /sbin/init in the container; instead create .container files in /etc/containers/systemd/ (rootful) or ~/.config/containers/systemd/*.container (for rootless) so that the host systemd manages and logs the container processes. Then realized you said QEMU not LXC. LXD: https://canonical.com/lxd : > LXD provides both [QEMU,] KVM-based VMs and system containers based on LXC – that can run a full Linux OS – in a single open source virtualisation platform. LXD has numerous built-in management features, including live migration, snapshots, resource restrictions, projects and profiles, and governs the interaction with various storage and networking options. From https://documentation.ubuntu.com/lxd/latest/reference/storag... : > LXD supports the following storage drivers for storing images, instances and custom volumes: > Btrfs, CephFS, Ceph Object, Ceph RBD, Dell PowerFlex, Pure Storage, HPE Alletra, Directory, LVM, ZFS You can run Podman or Docker within an LXD host; with or without a backing storage pool. FWIU it's possible for containers in an LXD VM to use BTRFS, ZFS, or KVM storage drivers to create e.g. BTRFS subvolumes instead of running overlayfs within the VM by editing storage.conf.
In How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-Like Container from Scratch
psviderski·Jun 19, 2025
You need a containerd on the remote end (Docker and Kubernetes use containerd) and anything that speaks registry API (OCI Distribution spec: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec) on the client. Unregistry reuses the official Docker registry code for the API layer so it looks and feels like https://hub.docker.com/_/registry You can use skopeo, crane, regclient, BuildKit, anything that speaks OCI-registry on the client. Although you will need to manually run unregistry on the remote host to use them. 'docker pussh' command just automates the workflow using the local Docker. Just check it out, it's a bash script: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry/blob/main/docker-pu... You can hack your own way pretty easily.
In Show HN: Unregistry – “docker push” directly to servers without a registry
jacobwg·Sep 5, 2024
Uploading in chunks could definitely solve the issue, and the OCI Distribution Specification does actually have some language about an optional chunked push API[0]. Unfortunately very few of the registry clients actually support this, critically containerd does not[1], so this means your regular `docker push` and a whole lot of ecosystem tooling does not work. This also means that the single PUT must be able to support very large pushes as a single request, possibly even larger than what R2 or S3 would allow without using multipart upload. This means you actually need a server to accept the PUT, then do its own chunked upload to object storage or otherwise stage the content before it's finally saved in object storage. This rules out presigned URLs for push too, since the PUT request made to the presigned URL can be too large for the backi
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ng object storage to accept. There's also other processing that ideally happens on push (like hash digest verification of the pushed layer) that mean a server somewhere needs to be involved. [0] https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec/blob/mai... [1] https://github.com/containerd/containerd/blob/192679b05917b5...
In Serverless-registry: A Docker registry backed by Workers and R2
stabbles·Jul 12, 2024
The OCI Distribution Spec is not great, it does not read like a specification that was carefully designed. > According to the specification, a layer push must happen sequentially: even if you upload the layer in chunks, each chunk needs to finish uploading before you can move on to the next one. As far as I've tested with DockerHub and GHCR, chunked upload is broken anyways, and clients upload each blob/layer as a whole. The spec also promotes `Content-Range` value formats that do not match the RFC7233 format. (That said, there's parallelism on the level of blobs, just not per blob) Another gripe of mine is that they missed the opportunity to standardize pagination of listing tags, because they accidentally deleted some text from the standard [1]. Now different registries roll their own. [1] https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-
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spec/issues/4...
In Using S3 as a Container Registry
wofo·Jul 12, 2024
Layers are fully independent of each other in the OCI spec (which makes them reusable). They are wired together through a separate manifest file that lists the layers of a specific image. It's a mystery... Here are the bits of the OCI spec about multipart pushes (https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec/blob/58d...). In short, you can only upload the next chunk after the previous one finishes, because you need to use information from the response's headers.
In Using S3 as a Container Registry
jzelinskie·Feb 5, 2021
This has been in the works for a while! It's exciting to see core components being officially put into the hands of the community. Docker distribution is the second implementation of a container registry ever (the first was written in Python by Docker and was later forked into Quay) and is at the core of many of the commonly used container registries like Docker Hub and Harbor. This repository became the basis for the OCI distribution specification[0], which is now the standard for distributing container images (and more[1]). [0]: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec [1]: https://github.com/opencontainers/artifacts
In Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF
jzelinskie·Jun 13, 2018
Justin linked the blog post[0] which is probably the best written description. The short of it is that when you upload layers to Quay, it stream calculates the BitTorrent pieces. Private layers are given unique swarms isolated by namespace and peer discovery is protected by a tracker[1] that contains middleware validating JWTs passed in the announce URL of the torrent. A custom client[2] can be used to simplify downloading and importing of images into the local docker CAS. Honestly, most organizations don't have sophisticated enough networks that the benefits outweigh the complexity of p2p orchestration. This is why it's popular at Alibaba, Facebook, Twitter, but most people are still just using the OCI distribution protocol[3]. Feel free to contact me (Keybase is in my profile) if interested. I'd love to get more people on the path to p2
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p, but it's often a solution looking for a problem. [0]: https://coreos.com/blog/torrent-pulls [1]: http://chihaya.io [2]: https://github.com/coreos/quayctl [3]: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec
In Dragonfly: Alibaba P2P file distribution system

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