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The Buildah package provides a command line tool that can be used to

• create a working container, either from scratch or using an image as a starting point
• create an image, either from a working container or via the instructions in a Dockerfile
• images can be built in either the OCI image format or the traditional upstream docker image format
• mount a working container's root filesystem for manipulation
• unmount a working container's root filesystem
• use the updated contents of a container's root filesystem as a filesystem layer to create a new image
• delete a working container or an image
• rename a local container

For blogs, release announcements and more, please checkout thebuildah.io website!

Buildah Container Images

Buildah Demos

Changelog

Contributing

Development Plan

Installation notes

Troubleshooting Guide

Tutorials

Buildah and Podman are two complementary open-source projects that areavailable on most Linux platforms and both projects reside atGitHub.com with Buildahhere and Podmanhere. Both, Buildah and Podman arecommand line tools that work on Open Container Initiative (OCI) images andcontainers. The two projects differentiate in their specialization.

Buildah specializes in building OCI images. Buildah's commands replicate allof the commands that are found in a Dockerfile. This allows building imageswith and without Dockerfiles while not requiring any root privileges.Buildah’s ultimate goal is to provide a lower-level coreutils interface tobuild images. The flexibility of building images without Dockerfiles allowsfor the integration of other scripting languages into the build process.Buildah follows a simple fork-exec model and does not run as a daemonbut it is based on a comprehensive API in golang, which can be vendoredinto other tools.

Podman specializes in all of the commands and functions that help you to maintain and modifyOCI images, such as pulling and tagging. It also allows you to create, run, and maintain those containerscreated from those images. For building container images via Dockerfiles, Podman uses Buildah'sgolang API and can be installed independently from Buildah.

A major difference between Podman and Buildah is their concept of a container. Podmanallows users to create "traditional containers" where the intent of these containers isto be long lived. While Buildah containers are really just created to allow contentto be added back to the container image. An easy way to think of it is thebuildah run command emulates the RUN command in a Dockerfile while thepodman runcommand emulates thedocker run command in functionality. Because of this and their underlyingstorage differences, you can not see Podman containers from within Buildah or vice versa.

In short, Buildah is an efficient way to create OCI images while Podman allowsyou to manage and maintain those images and containers in a production environment usingfamiliar container cli commands. For more details, see theContainer Tools Guide.

From./examples/lighttpd.sh:

$ cat> lighttpd.sh<<"EOF"#!/usr/bin/env bashset -xctr1=$(buildah from "${1:-fedora}")## Get all updates and install our minimal httpd serverbuildah run "$ctr1" -- dnf update -ybuildah run "$ctr1" -- dnf install -y lighttpd## Include some buildtime annotationsbuildah config --annotation "com.example.build.host=$(uname -n)" "$ctr1"## Run our server and expose the portbuildah config --cmd "/usr/sbin/lighttpd -D -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf" "$ctr1"buildah config --port 80 "$ctr1"## Commit this container to an image namebuildah commit "$ctr1" "${2:-$USER/lighttpd}"EOF$ chmod +x lighttpd.sh$ ./lighttpd.sh

Future goals include:

• more CI tests
• additional CLI commands (?)