Install oras with Homebrew, apt, Nix, scoop, winget, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• oras

Project history

The ORAS project was established and open-sourced in December 2018. Its early significance came from a practical gap in the OCI ecosystem: registries had mature distribution, authentication, replication, and access-control machinery, but developers lacked standard client tooling for non-image artifacts such as Helm charts, policy bundles, signatures, and SBOMs.

ORAS joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation at Sandbox maturity on July 13, 2021. The CNCF project page records the first commit on December 24, 2018 and identifies the project as multi-language OCI registry SDKs and a CLI.

Adoption history

ORAS became important as the OCI ecosystem moved from storing images to storing supply-chain metadata and other deployable artifacts beside images. The ORAS project blog lists adopters and integrations including Amazon ECR, Amazon EKS Anywhere, Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh, Artifact Hub, Docker Hub, GitHub, Google Cloud, Helm, Singularity, Microsoft Azure Container Registry, Notary v2, KubeApps by VMware Tanzu, VMware Application Catalog, Emporous by Red Hat, soci-snapshotter by AWS, and Zot.

The project also fed back into OCI standardization. ORAS maintainers incubated artifact-reference work under the ORAS Artifact manifest project, and the ORAS blog describes that work being contributed to OCI Image and Distribution v1.1 release-candidate specifications in September 2022.

How it is used

Operators use the `oras` CLI to push, pull, copy, attach, discover, tag, and inspect artifacts in registries that speak the OCI distribution protocol. That makes a registry useful for SBOMs, signatures, vulnerability reports, WASM modules, policy bundles, model files, and release payloads that need the same distribution and access-control model as images.

Tool authors use ORAS libraries, especially `oras-go`, to build registry-native clients. The ORAS Go documentation describes the v2 package as a registry client and content-replication library for applications that want to store arbitrary content in container registries.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, ORAS is a bridge between package distribution and container infrastructure. It turns the OCI registry from a Docker-image endpoint into a content-addressed package transport, which is why it appears in conversations about Helm, Notary, SBOMs, GitOps policy bundles, and registry-native release artifacts.

The `brew:oras` package is a compact CLI surface over a much larger ecosystem shift: using registry semantics, digests, media types, and artifact references as package-manager primitives.

Timeline

• 2018-12: ORAS was established and open-sourced.
• 2021-07-13: ORAS was accepted into CNCF Sandbox.
• 2022-09: ORAS artifact-reference work was contributed toward OCI Image and Distribution v1.1 release-candidate specifications.
• 2024-06-18: ORAS v1.2.0 was announced with OCI Spec v1.1.0 support.

Related projects

• ORAS sits beside the OCI image-spec and distribution-spec, and it is used by registry and supply-chain projects including Helm, Notary v2, Artifact Hub, Zot, and soci-snapshotter. Its language libraries include Go, Python, Rust, Java, .NET, and JavaScript-facing projects listed from the ORAS website.

Sources

• https://oras.land/
• https://oras.land/blog/oras-looking-back-at-2022-and-forward-to-2023/
• https://oras.land/docs/1.2/client_libraries/go/
• https://www.cncf.io/blog/2024/06/18/announcing-oras-v1-2-0-oci-spec-v1-1-0-support-formatted-output-and-more/
• https://www.cncf.io/projects/oras/