Buildah

Buildah is a command-line tool for building Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant container images without requiring a Dockerfile or a running container daemon. Developed by Red Hat as part of the Podman ecosystem (alongside Podman for container runtime and Skopeo for image management), Buildah provides a shell-script-based approach to image building that offers significantly more flexibility and control than traditional Dockerfile-based builds. The core design philosophy of Buildah is to decouple image building from any specific container runtime or daemon: instead of requiring a Dockerfile and a running dockerd, Buildah operates as a standalone tool that creates, modifies, and commits container images using simple shell commands. This makes it ideal for CI/CD pipelines, build scripts, and environments where running a persistent daemon is undesirable or impossible. Key features include: the ability to build images entirely from shell scripts (no Dockerfile needed, using commands like buildah from to create a working container, buildah run to execute commands inside it, buildah copy and buildah add to add files, and buildah commit to save the result as an image), support for building from Dockerfiles (via buildah bud for backward compatibility), creation of images from scratch (buildah from scratch for building minimal images with only the necessary binaries and libraries), running build commands inside a container without a running daemon (using a combination of runroot and runtime options), support for both OCI and Docker image formats, mounting and modifying container root filesystems directly (buildah mount for accessing the container filesystem as a host directory), integration with Podman, Skopeo, and CRI-O, and support for user namespaces and rootless builds (building images without root privileges). As of 2026, Buildah has over 8,300 GitHub stars.