clipper pull
Pull a chunked image and load it into the local container runtime.
clipper pull <src> [<name>] [flags]Arguments
| Argument | Description |
|---|---|
<src> | Image reference (e.g. myuser/ubuntu:latest) |
[<name>] | Local image name. Defaults to the source reference. |
Flags
| Flag | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
-j, --jobs | 4 | Parallel chunk fetch workers |
--runtime | auto-detect | Force container runtime: containerd, podman, or docker |
--fetch-only | false | Fetch chunks to local store only, skip loading into the runtime |
--platform | host platform | Target platform (e.g. linux/amd64) |
Examples
Pull an image
clipper pull myuser/ubuntu:latestPull with a custom local name
clipper pull myuser/ubuntu:latest my-ubuntu:latestPull with more parallelism
clipper pull myuser/large-image:latest -j 16Fetch chunks without loading
clipper pull --fetch-only myuser/ubuntu:latestThis downloads all chunks to the local store (~/.local/share/clipper/) without importing into Docker/containerd. Useful for pre-caching.
How it works
- Fetches the manifest from the registry
- Downloads chunks for each layer, skipping any already in the local store
- Reconstructs the original tar layers from chunks
- Loads the image into the local container runtime (Docker, containerd, or Podman)
For containerd, clipper applies layers directly to snapshots without going through a tar intermediary, which is faster.