Podman can transfer container images without a registry

I wish containers hadn&#x27;t created the abstractions of a registry and an image instead of exposing it all as tar files (which is what it kind of is under the covers) served over a glorified file server. This leads to people assuming there&#x27;s some kind of magic happening and that the entire process is very arcane, when in reality it&#x27;s just unpacking tar files.<p>If you want to DIY a container with unix tools, this should help: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;containers.gitbook.io&#x2F;build-containers-the-hard-way&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;containers.gitbook.io&#x2F;build-containers-the-hard-way&#x2F;</a>

You can do this with Docker easily as well<p>docker save &lt;image&gt; | ssh &lt;remote host&gt; docker load

It&#x27;s interesting skopeo [1] hasn&#x27;t popped up in this discussion, partially because it is part of redhat&#x27;s container tools along with podman, and partially because although it started out as a tool to examine remote containers it too supports container migration, but not just between registries.<p>From the linked website &quot;Skopeo is a tool for moving container images between different types of container storages. It allows you to copy container images between container registries like docker.io, quay.io, and your internal container registry or different types of storage on your local system&quot;. Perhaps redhat plan to roll up skopeo functionality into Podman at some point?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;skopeo-10-released#:~:text=Skopeo%20is%20a%20tool%20for,storage%20on%20your%20local%20system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;skopeo-10-released#:~:text=Sk...</a>.

Containerd and nerdctl have the neat trick of (experimental) support for distributing images over IPFS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;containerd&#x2F;nerdctl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ipfs.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;containerd&#x2F;nerdctl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ipfs....</a>

It&#x27;s unclear if this will be faster if the image already exists (layers exist).<p>a docker push&#x2F;docker pull can skip layers that already exist.

Anybody know of some simple&#x2F;lighweight registry for local usage? Quay boasts itself as a super duper enterprisey all solution. I&#x27;m looking for something more of a &#x27;simple http server with basic acl&#x27; solution.

I use this trick to push to servers in an unnecessarily tight network I have to deploy to sometimes that can&#x27;t see my source control &#x2F; container registry.<p>But I do it for Docker. I have overall the sense that Podman is trying to accomplish feature parity with Docker but isn&#x27;t there yet. Feedback on this formulation?