imaged 2026.7.4

One interface to docker, podman and Apple's container.

imaged gives you one interface to docker, podman and Apple’s container. Start a container, speak to its standard streams, and be told what went wrong in terms you can branch on.

from imaged import Engine

engine = Engine.detect()

id = await engine.create_pulling_if_needed("alpine", "cat")
async with engine.start(id) as session:
    await session.send("hello")
    assert await session.receive() == "hello"

Why

Every engine reports the same failure differently, and none of them do so machine readably – not even over their HTTP APIs. Working out that an image simply doesn’t exist otherwise means matching on substrings of prose, separately for each engine. imaged does that once, and raises NoSuchImage.

Each engine is driven via its command line interface, which is the only mechanism all three have in common, as Apple’s container has no HTTP API at all. Doing so also leaves the engine to demultiplex container stdio onto real pipes, rather than leaving you to unpick its framing.

Containers get no networking unless you ask for it, on the theory that something you are running should have to say so before it can phone home.

anyio is the only async dependency, so this runs unmodified on both asyncio and trio. Its own test suite runs on both, against all three engines.