Manipulating Docker images without Docker installed

Recently I’ve been playing a bit more with Docker images and Docker image repositories. I had in the past written a quick hack to let me extract files from a Docker image, but I wanted to do something a little more mature than that.

For example, sometimes you want to download an image from a Docker image repository without using Docker. Naively if you had Docker, you’d do something like this:

docker pull busybox
docker save busybox

However, that assumes that you have Docker installed on the machine downloading the images, and that’s sometimes not possible for security reasons. The most obvious example I can think of is airgapped secure environments where you need to walk the data between two networks, and the unclassified network machine doesn’t allow administrator access to install Docker.

So I wrote a little tool to do image manipulation for me. The tool is called Occy Strap, is written in python, and is available on pypi. That means installing it is relatively simple:

python3 -m venv ~/virtualenvs/occystrap
. ~/virtualenvs/occystrap/bin/activate
pip install occystrap

Which doesn’t require administrator permissions. There are then a few things we can do with Occy Strap.

Downloading an image from a repository and storing as a tarball

Let’s say we want to download an image from a repository and store it as a local tarball. This is a common thing to want to do in airgapped environments for example. You could do this with docker with a docker pull; docker save. The Occy Strap equivalent is:

occystrap fetch-to-tarfile library/busybox \
    latest busybox.tar

In this example we’re pulling from the Docker Hub (, and are downloading busybox’s latest version into a tarball named busybox-occy.tar. This tarball can be loaded with docker load -i busybox.tar on an airgapped Docker environment.

Downloading an image from a repository and storing as an extracted tarball

The format of the tarball in the previous example is two JSON configuration files and a series of image layers as tarballs inside the main tarball. You can write these elements to a directory instead of to a tarball if you’d like to inspect them. For example:

occystrap fetch-to-extracted library/centos 7 \

This example will pull from the Docker Hub the Centos image with the label “7”, and write the content to a directory in the current working directory called “centos7”. If you tarred centos7 like this, you’d end up with a tarball equivalent to what fetch-to-tarfile produces, which could therefore be loaded with docker load:

cd centos7; tar -cf ../centos7.tar *

Downloading an image from a repository and storing it in a merged directory

In scenarios where image layers are likely to be reused between images (for example many images which share a common base layer), you can save disk space by downloading images to a directory which contains more than one image. To make this work, you need to instruct Occy Strap to use unique names for the JSON elements within the image file:

occystrap fetch-to-extracted --use-unique-names \ 
    homeassistant/home-assistant latest merged_images
    homeassistant/home-assistant stable merged_images
    homeassistant/home-assistant 2021.3.0.dev20210219 merged_images

Each of these images include 21 layers, but the merged_images directory at the time of writing this there are 25 unique layers in the directory. You end up with a layout like this:

manifest-homeassistant_home-assistant-latest.json manifest-

catalog.json is an Occy Strap specific artefact which maps which layers are used by which image. Each of the manifest files for the various images have been converted to have a unique name instead of manifest.json as well.

To extract a single image from such a shared directory, use the recreate-image command:

occystrap recreate-image merged_images homeassistant/home-assistant \
    latest ha-latest.tar

Exploring the contents of layers and overwritten files

Similarly, if you’d like the layers to be expanded from their tarballs to the filesystem, you can pass the --expand argument to fetch-to-extracted to have them extracted. This will also create a filesystem at the name of the manifest which is the final state of the image (the layers applied sequential). For example:

occystrap fetch-to-extracted --expand \ 
    ukhomeofficedigital/centos-base latest ukhomeoffice-centos

Note that layers delete files from previous layers with files named “.wh.$previousfilename”. These files are not processed in the expanded layers, so that they are visible to the user. They are however processed in the merged layer named for the manifest file.