Containers — publish OCI images

Read before publishing an OCI image, updating a container tag, choosing Blossom storage, or constructing a gateway pull reference. Protocol background: https://ngit.dev/protocol/software-publishing

Model

ngit container publish (alias ngit oci publish) uploads the OCI blobs reachable from the tagged entries of an OCI image layout to Blossom, then signs a kind-30624 addressable event mapping tags to manifest digests. The event is bound to the current kind-30617 git repository, so run it inside that repository with a signer who is a confirmed maintainer. Gateways are read-only:

docker pull ncontainer.io/<npub>/<repository>:<tag>

Publish

Export an OCI image layout first, for example podman push myimage oci:/tmp/myimage:latest, then publish every tagged root:

ngit container publish myimage \
  --layout /tmp/myimage \
  --blossom-server https://blossom-one.example \
  --blossom-server https://blossom-two.example \
  --relay wss://relay.example \
  --source https://example.com/myimage \
  --json

A checked-in .ngit/containers.yaml lets ngit container publish myimage --json select an entry:

schema: 1
publication:
  blossom_servers: [https://blossom-one.example, https://blossom-two.example]
  relays: [wss://relay.example]
containers:
  myimage:
    layout: artifacts/myimage
    source: https://example.com/myimage

Relative paths resolve from the repository root. --manifest PATH selects another file; --no-manifest ignores the default and requires --layout. A loaded manifest must define NAME. CLI layout and metadata override the entry, a non-empty CLI Blossom list replaces the configured list, and CLI relays extend configured relays. Signer selection, --replace, and output mode stay on the command line.

Behaviour to know:

NAME is one lowercase OCI repository-name component.
Tags come from org.opencontainers.image.ref.name annotations in index.json; filenames and git tags are irrelevant. index.json itself is never uploaded; ngit merges the layout's tags into the tag map fetched from the latest kind-30624 event.
Without --blossom-server, ngit uses the publisher's latest kind-10063 server list. A single server means no redundancy. Every blob is checked on every server, missing copies are uploaded with bounded retries and verified, and the event is signed once each blob has at least one confirmed copy; incomplete replication is reported per server.
--relay extends the repository's relays; account and default relays are not added. ngit reads the repository relays before and after uploading and needs at least one success each time. A total preflight failure or a concurrent-update refusal is safe to retry: uploaded blobs are content-addressed. Keep a known state-bearing repository relay reachable when changing relay sets, because a healthy empty relay cannot reveal an event stranded elsewhere and a publish could then omit old tags.

Merge versus replace

Ordinary publication updates the tags found in the new layout and retains older tags, previous server hints, omitted metadata, and unknown event tags. --replace publishes only the new layout's tags and selected servers, drops omitted description, source, and unknown tags, and sets the title to --title or NAME. Use it only when the user explicitly wants complete replacement.

JSON

A successful result has command: "container.publish", a warnings array, and result fields: repository, git_repository, npub, name, naddr, manifest_path (or null), raw-hex event_id (unlike collaboration commands' nevent ids), tags and updated_tags, per-blob SHA-256, size, and per-server placement, final blossom_servers, and per-relay accepted. Success means at least one relay accepted the event; inspect every result.relays[].accepted when full fanout matters. Failures use command_status: "error" with error.details holding per-blob and per-server outcomes and possible orphan blobs.

Limits

ngit accepts OCI and Docker v2 manifests and indexes using SHA-256, uploads only blobs reachable from tagged roots, and rejects missing, oversized, deeply nested, or mismatched graphs. It snapshots one blob at a time, so allow temporary disk roughly equal to the largest layer. It does not build images, push to registries, run a gateway, chunk layers, pull, list, or delete remote blobs or tags. Software release assets use the separate ngit release model.

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