Image tags and architectures

The official image is published to ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm. This chapter covers three things: which tags exist and when to use each; which CPU architectures the image supports and how they are selected on pull; and what those -amd64 / -arm64 suffixed tags on the GHCR package page are, and whether you should use them.

Tag semantics and when to use them

tag	meaning	when to use
vX.Y.Z	immutable, corresponds to one formal release	recommended for production — reproducible and rollback-able
latest	floating, always points at the newest formal release	trialing, single-node, non-strict environments
sha-<sha7>	immutable, corresponds to a specific git commit (7-char short sha)	tracing a binary back to source, troubleshooting

⚠️ Do not use latest in production: it is a floating tag, so a restart or scale-out can pull a different version, and a failure can neither be reproduced nor rolled back to a known target. Pin vX.Y.Z; for absolute immutability pin further to @sha256:<digest> (see below).

Supported architectures

The official image is a multi-arch OCI index, so docker pull auto-resolves the architecture for your host with no extra flags:

platform	coverage
linux/amd64	x86_64: Intel / AMD servers, Docker Desktop on Windows, Intel Mac
linux/arm64	aarch64: Kunpeng / Phytium / AWS Graviton / Ampere, Apple Silicon

docker / containerd / Kubernetes / podman / nerdctl all select automatically from the OCI index's platform field, so the same docker pull ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:latest fetches arm64 on an ARM server and amd64 on an x86 server.

Architectures not published: armv7, ppc64le, s390x, loongarch64 (Loongson), etc. Pulling on these platforms reports:

no matching manifest for linux/<arch> in the manifest list entries

This is a hard limit — only linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 are published.

When you need to pin an architecture explicitly

Usually you don't. But for cross-arch builds, image mirroring, or air-gapped environments, you can pin precisely two ways:

# Option 1: --platform picks the platform
docker pull --platform linux/arm64 ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:v0.2.0

# Option 2: @digest pins to an exact manifest (absolutely immutable)
docker pull ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm@sha256:<digest>

⚠️ Don't pin linux/amd64 on an ARM host: the pull succeeds (the manifest exists), but the container fails to start with exec format error — the binary is x86 instructions that the ARM CPU can't execute without an emulation layer like QEMU / Rosetta. Likewise, don't pin linux/arm64 on an x86 host.

Those -amd64 / -arm64 suffixed tags on the package page

Open the GHCR package page: releases up to v0.2.0 additionally list v0.2.0-amd64, v0.2.0-arm64, latest-amd64, and similar suffixed tags.

These are intermediate artifacts from the earlier build pipeline — ignore them. Their origin: in earlier releases, the two architecture legs each pushed an addressable intermediate tag (<tag>-<arch>) on separate build machines for the merge step to reference. Their content is byte-identical to the same-platform slice of the corresponding multi-arch tag — v0.2.0-arm64 is exactly the linux/arm64 slice inside v0.2.0, nothing more.

Two key points:

1. They can't be deleted. Each intermediate tag shares a package version with the matching slice of the multi-arch tag; deleting it would also drop that architecture's reference from v0.2.0 / latest, breaking pulls for that architecture.
2. New releases no longer produce them. The build pipeline now pushes intermediate images to a private staging repo, leaving only the final multi-arch tag in the public package.

So: just use vX.Y.Z / latest directly; to pin an architecture use --platform or @digest above, and ignore the suffixed tags.

Offline / air-gapped transfer

docker save only exports the single image your local daemon resolved — the one architecture you pulled — losing the multi-arch index. Two correct approaches for offline environments:

# Option 1: pull per-platform first, then save (yields a single-arch tar)
docker pull --platform linux/arm64 ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:v0.2.0
docker save ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:v0.2.0 -o gatellm-arm64.tar

# Option 2: skopeo copy --all preserves the full index (for syncing to a private registry)
skopeo copy --all docker://ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:v0.2.0 docker://registry.example.com/gatellm:v0.2.0

Verification commands

# See whether a tag is a multi-arch index (lists all platforms)
docker buildx imagetools inspect ghcr.io/gatellm-io/gatellm:latest

# See which architecture actually landed in your local daemon
docker image inspect gatellm --format '{{.Architecture}}'

Related

• Docker single-node quickstart — zero-config in 5 minutes, including a "supported architectures" section
• Production checklist — must-check before production, including "image version"
• Licensing and authorization — the image is a commercial build; unlicensed it runs as the free edition