Buildah

Buildah is a daemonless CLI for building OCI container images from Containerfiles, remote build contexts, or manually assembled working containers. It focuses on the build path: create a working container, modify its filesystem and image config, inspect the result, then commit or push it.

• Build OCI or Docker-format images from Containerfiles, Git or URL build contexts, or scratch without depending on a long-running Docker daemon.
• Create working containers from base images, run build steps inside them, copy files, change image metadata, mount the root filesystem, then commit the result into a reusable image.
• Inspect local images, containers, manifests, and host storage details, and push finished images or manifest lists to registries.

• Several read paths are machine-readable: inspect emits JSON by default, info returns JSON unless templated, and images, containers, mount, version, and manifest inspect support JSON output.
• Commands map cleanly to inspect/change/verify loops in CI or agent workflows because the core build, config, copy, commit, push, and inspect operations are direct shell subcommands rather than an interactive UI.
• Fit is strongest on Linux build hosts with container storage already configured; rootless mounts may require buildah unshare, and registry auth or storage-driver issues can interrupt unattended runs.

• Upstream docs describe Buildah as Linux-focused, and the tutorial says it is not supported on Windows or Mac platforms.
• The project is primarily an image builder, not the main runtime surface for long-lived containers; the README and tutorial direct broader runtime workflows to podman.