For the ones who don't know me, one of my personal "passion" is to try a maximum of Linux distributions on WSL2.
Some years ago, I found out (with some others), that WSL2 needed a rootfs that was very similar to a container rootfs. I performed a short demo by running an alpine container, exported it and re-imported it in WSL2: eureka, it worked flawlessly.
Like I said, I wasn't the only one to have such idea, but this "technique" remains my principal one to quickly test a new distro, if the container image is available.
Now, enters Crane, a tool for interacting with remote images and registries. While it already sounds very cool, the very useful command is export . The big difference from my current workflow, is the fact that Crane exports directly the content from the image, where a docker image export will export the layers separately.
Another very useful feature with Crane is the fact that, as it exports the image without the need to run a container, the docker image ls will not show any stored image. Meaning, I will not have to clean the containers and images of my different tests. A potential huge gain in space.
