crane-manifest

Get the manifest

$ crane manifest [image_name]

$ crane manifest [[-h|--help]]

crane manifest [OPTIONS] IMAGE

--platform, -p PLATFORM
    Fetch manifest only for specific platform (e.g., linux/amd64)

--help, -h
    Display command help

The crane manifest command is a subcommand of the crane CLI tool, part of the go-containerregistry project. It efficiently retrieves the JSON manifest for a specified OCI container image without downloading layers or config blobs, making it ideal for quick inspections.

Manifests describe image structure, including layer digests, sizes, media types, config references, and for multi-platform images, architecture-specific entries (via OCI image index).

Use cases include verifying image existence, checking multi-arch support, auditing layers before pull, or scripting registry queries. Output is raw JSON, parseable with jq for details like architecture, os, or layers array.

Supports public and private registries; authentication via standard crane mechanisms. Faster than full pulls, leveraging registry API directly.

Requires registry access; private images need auth via crane auth login. Does not fetch layers/config—use crane cat or crane config for those. Multi-platform defaults to index; specify --platform for variants.

crane manifest alpine:3.18
Retrieves manifest for latest Alpine.

crane manifest -p linux/arm64 alpine:3.18
Platform-specific manifest.

crane manifest gcr.io/project/image@sha256:digest
Digest-pinned fetch.

Developed by Google as part of go-containerregistry (v0.0.0 in 2019, CLI stabilized ~2021). Widely used in CI/CD, Kosbuild, and sigstore tools for lightweight image ops.

crane(1), skopeo(1), docker-manifest(1)