Copy to docker-daemon overlay2 storage

[Benjamin Tamasi]

Is there a way to copy an image to the overlay2 storage that docker daemon uses without running the docker daemon? I'd like to just specify a path on the filesystem where the overlay2 storage is.
I'm running in an environment where I cannot run docker daemon but I need to load the images into the overlay2 storage so when docker daemon is started it has those images preloaded

[Miloslav Trmač]

Thanks for reaching out.

That feature doesn’t exist, and I don’t think it can be reasonably supported. Docker’s image storage is, presumably, an internal implementation detail of Docker; so, running docker pull or maybe docker load (incl. using a docker-daemon: destination in Skopeo), perhaps in a container/VM/some other isolation, would be the only supportable way to modify that storage.

[Benjamin Tamasi]

thanks @mtrmac for clearing that up. I'm struggling to build a customised raspberry pi image with some preloaded docker images already loaded. I wanted to avoid exporting to tar files and running docker load on first boot as that slows things down quite a lot, especially with slow sd cards. I wonder if there is any other way to achieve this.

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