container-inspector is a suite of analysis utilities and command line tools for Docker container images, their layers and how these relate to each other. It can also handle OCI images and Dockerfiles.
container-inspector is a suite of analysis utilities and command line tools for Docker images, containers, root filesystems and virtual machine images.
For Docker images, it can process layers and how these relate to each other as well as Dockerfiles.
container-inspector provides utilities to:
./configure --dev
.env/bin/container-inspector -h
for help.container-inspector handles the formats of Docker images as created by the
docker save
command. There are three versions for this Docker image format.
The latest v1.2 is a minor update to v1.1.
v1.1 provides improved and richer metadata over v1.0 with a top level manifest.json file and a Config file for each image with full layer history and ordeing. It also use checksum for enhanced security and traceability of images and layers.
v1.0 uses a simple repositories
meta file and requires infering the ordering of
the layers in an image based on each individual layer json
meta file. This
format is no longer support in the latest version of container-inspector.
All V1.x formats use the same storage format for layers e.g the layer format V1.0 where each layer is stored in a sub-directories named after the layer id. Each of this directories contains a "layer.tar" tarball with the layer payload, a "json" JSON metadata file describing the layer and a "VERSION" file describing the layer format version. Each tarball represents a slice or diff of the image root file system using the AUFS conventions.
At runtime, in a sequence of layers of an image, each root filesystem slice of a layer is "layered" on top of each other from the root bottom layer to the latest layer (or selected tagged layer) using a union file system (e.g. AUFS). In AUFS, any file or directory prefixed with .wh. are "white outs" files deleting files in the underlying layers.
See the image specifications saved in docs/references/