containerd(8)
containerd is a daemon that manages container lifecycle and image operations on Linux systems.
Synopsis
containerd [OPTIONS] COMMANDDescription
containerd is an industry-standard container runtime that manages the complete container lifecycle including image transfer, storage, container execution, and supervision. It runs as a daemon and provides a gRPC API for container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Docker.
The daemon handles low-level container operations, image management, and networking configuration. It uses runc or other OCI-compliant runtimes as execution engines but abstracts away the complexity through its unified API.
Common options
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
-a, --address | address for the GRPC socket (default: /run/containerd/containerd.sock) |
-c, --config | path to the configuration file (default: /etc/containerd/config.toml) |
--log-level | set the logging level (debug, info, warn, error) |
--root | root directory for container state (default: /var/lib/containerd) |
--state | directory for runtime state (default: /run/containerd) |
-v, --version | print the version and exit |
-h, --help | show help information |
Examples
start the containerd daemon with default configuration
containerdstart containerd using a specific configuration file
containerd -c /etc/containerd/config.tomlstart containerd with debug-level logging
containerd --log-level=debuglist all container images (using ctr client against running containerd)
ctr images lscreate a container from an Alpine image
ctr containers create docker.io/library/alpine:latest mycontainerstart containerd as a systemd service
systemctl start containerd