load

Load an image from a tar archive or STDIN

Aliases

docker image load, docker load

Options

Name	Type	Default	Description
-i, --input	string		Read from tar archive file, instead of STDIN
--platform	stringSlice		Load only the given platform(s). Formatted as a comma-separated list of os[/arch[/variant]] (e.g., linux/amd64,linux/arm64/v8).
-q, --quiet	bool		Suppress the load output

Description

Load an image or repository from a tar archive (even if compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz or zstd) from a file or STDIN. It restores both images and tags.

Examples

$ docker image ls

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

Load images from STDIN

$ docker load < busybox.tar.gz

Loaded image: busybox:latest
$ docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
busybox             latest              769b9341d937        7 weeks ago         2.489 MB

Load images from a file (--input)

$ docker load --input fedora.tar

Loaded image: fedora:rawhide
Loaded image: fedora:20

$ docker images

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
busybox             latest              769b9341d937        7 weeks ago         2.489 MB
fedora              rawhide             0d20aec6529d        7 weeks ago         387 MB
fedora              20                  58394af37342        7 weeks ago         385.5 MB
fedora              heisenbug           58394af37342        7 weeks ago         385.5 MB
fedora              latest              58394af37342        7 weeks ago         385.5 MB

Load a specific platform (--platform)

The --platform option allows you to specify which platform variant of the image to load. By default, docker load loads all platform variants that are present in the archive. Use the --platform option to specify which platform variant of the image to load. An error is produced if the given platform is not present in the archive.

The platform option takes the os[/arch[/variant]] format; for example, linux/amd64 or linux/arm64/v8. Architecture and variant are optional, and default to the daemon's native architecture if omitted.

The following example loads the linux/amd64 variant of an alpine image from an archive that contains multiple platform variants.

$ docker image load -i image.tar --platform=linux/amd64
Loaded image: alpine:latest

The following example attempts to load a linux/ppc64le image from an archive, but the given platform is not present in the archive;

$ docker image load -i image.tar --platform=linux/ppc64le
requested platform (linux/ppc64le) not found: image might be filtered out