Skopeo

Skopeo is a command-line utility developed by the containers organization (Red Hat) for performing various operations on container images and image repositories without requiring a running container daemon. Unlike Docker which requires the dockerd daemon for image operations, Skopeo operates directly against container registries and local storage, making it ideal for CI/CD pipelines, air-gapped environments, and automation scripts. As of 2026, Skopeo has over 8,700 stars. Key capabilities include: image copying between registries (skopeo copy docker://source-registry/image:tag docker://dest-registry/image:tag), supporting docker://, docker-archive://, docker-daemon://, oci://, oci-archive://, dir://, and containers-storage:// transports, image inspection without pulling (skopeo inspect retrieves manifest, configuration, layers, and labels from remote registries), image signing and verification using sigstore/cosign or GPG, image deletion from registries, tag syncing (skopeo sync to mirror all tags from a source to a destination), image digest calculation for content-addressable verification, layer extraction and analysis, registry authentication via authfile or environment variables, multi-architecture image handling (listing and copying platform-specific manifests), OCI image layout operations (reading and writing OCI-compliant image directories), and YAML configuration via containers-registries.conf for defining additional registries, mirrors, and search order. Skopeo uses the same containers/image library as Podman and Buildah, ensuring consistent behavior across the Red Hat container tooling ecosystem. It supports all major registries including Docker Hub, Quay.io, Google Artifact Registry, Amazon ECR, Azure Container Registry, GitHub Container Registry, GitLab Container Registry, and Harbor.