Re: Question about podman load

On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 4:56 AM Yiding Liu (Fujitsu) <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi Bruce
>     I tryed to load image build from meta-virtualization as following
> steps.
>
>    1. Set OCI_IMAGE_TAG to a new value
>    OCI_IMAGE_TAG = "repo:2.0"
>
>    2. Load the image
>
>         # podman load -i container-base-repo_2.0-oci.tar
>
>         # podman images
>         localhost/repo                             2.0
> 039d39254c04  14 years ago   5.58 MB
>
>     I found OCI_IMAGE_TAG can specify the image.ref.name for oci image
> and loaded by podman,
>     it will have a format like  localhost/repo: 2.0.
>
>     My question is that how to specify the REPOSITORY "localhost" to
> another name?
>     For example
>         # podman images
>         buildmachine/repo                             2.0
> 039d39254c04  14 years ago   5.58 MB
>

The short answer is: there's no build time way you can change that, and it
isn't a limitation of anything we've done in meta-virt.

I ran into this when working through the new mult-layer OCI images and
the cross install features. I opted to leave it as-is in those cases, since
it
is the default behaviour.

Both podman and docker prepend localhost/ when loading images that
don't have a registry-qualified name.

The OCI ref.name annotation in index.json controls the name:tag portion,
but the registry prefix is enforced by the runtime:



Even if ref.name is buildmachine/repo:2.0, podman shows
localhost/buildmachine/repo:2.0 (still prepends localhost because
buildmachine doesn't look like a registry — no dots)






One workaround is to use a ref that looks like a registry hostname
i.e. contains a dot or colon.

So set:  OCI_IMAGE_TAG = "buildmachine.local/repo:2.0"

Which would give buildmachine.local/repo:2.0 in podman.

But for arbitrary names without a DNS-style prefix, the simplest
approach is to retag after load:

  podman load -i container-base-repo_2.0-oci.tar
  podman tag localhost/repo:2.0 buildmachine/repo:2.0

That's what I've planned for some normalization of names, but
I haven't done that work yet. So there may be issues lurking that
I'm not aware of.

Bruce


>
>
> Liu
>


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