README

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containerd is an industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness, and portability. It is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows, which can manage the complete container lifecycle of its host system: image transfer and storage, container execution and supervision, low-level storage and network attachments, etc.

containerd is a member of CNCF with 'graduated' status.

containerd is designed to be embedded into a larger system, rather than being used directly by developers or end-users.

!architecture

 Announcements

 Now Recruiting

We are a large inclusive OSS project that is welcoming help of any kind shape or form:
 Documentation help is needed to make the product easier to consume and extend.
 We need OSS community outreach/organizing help to get the word out; manage
and create messaging and educational content; and help with social media, community forums/groups, and google groups.
 We are actively inviting new security advisors to join the team.
 New subprojects are being created, core and non-core that could use additional development help.
 Each of the containerd projects has a list of issues currently being worked on or that need help resolving.
  - If the issue has not already been assigned to someone or has not made recent progress, and you are interested, please inquire.
  - If you are interested in starting with a smaller/beginner-level issue, look for issues with an exp/beginner tag, for example containerd/containerd beginner issues.

 Getting Started

See our documentation on containerd.io:
 for ops and admins
 namespaces
 client options

To get started contributing to containerd, see CONTRIBUTING.

If you are interested in trying out containerd see our example at Getting Started.

 Nightly builds

There are nightly builds available for download here.
Binaries are generated from main branch every night for Linux and Windows.

Please be aware: nightly builds might have critical bugs, it's not recommended for use in production and no support provided.

 Kubernetes (k8s) CI Dashboard Group

The k8s CI dashboard group for containerd contains test results regarding
the health of kubernetes when run against main and a number of containerd release branches.

- containerd-periodics

 Runtime Requirements

Runtime requirements for containerd are very minimal. Most interactions with
the Linux and Windows container feature sets are handled via runc and/or
OS-specific libraries (e.g. hcsshim for Microsoft).
The current required version of runc is described in RUNC.md.

There are specific features
used by containerd core code and snapshotters that will require a minimum kernel
version on Linux. With the understood caveat of distro kernel versioning, a
reasonable starting point for Linux is a minimum 4.x kernel version.

The overlay filesystem snapshotter, used by default, uses features that were
finalized in the 4.x kernel series. If you choos