Extracting Images Manually

[jferraro (Jeffrey Ferraro)]

I have a sever that is running docker that does not have Internet access but a file transfer utility. Is there a way that I can extract a docker image as a file, upload it to this server, and load the image manually?

[meyay (Metin Y.)]

docker image save:

docker image save

docker image load:

docker image load

Note, you can chain multiple image tags to save them all in one tar file and benefit from layer de-duplication. You can pipe the tar file to gzip or pigz to compress the file. The load command it able to process tar and tgz files.

Example for how to compress saved images with pigz (which comes as a dependency of docker):

Docker save/load performance

I know this is a rather old thread, but there are in fact ways to speed up the process: 1.) instead of saving each repo:tag individually, use a space seperated list of repo:tag elements as argument. As a result image layer’s will be deduplicated. 2.) use pigz, instead of gzip, to benefit from multithreading, The creation/extraction time can be further optimizied by using the --fast argument with pigz at the cost of the archive size. The command might look like this: docker image save ${list …