Today we are happy to announce a new open source project, Finch. Finch is a new command line client for building, running, and publishing Linux containers. It provides for simple installation of a native macOS client, along with a curated set of de facto standard open source components including Lima, nerdctl, containerd, and BuildKit. With Finch, you can create and run containers locally, and build and publish Open Container Initiative (OCI) container images.
At launch, Finch is a new project in its early days with basic functionality, initially only supporting macOS (on all Mac CPU architectures). Rather than iterating in private and releasing a finished project, we feel open source is most successful when diverse voices come to the party. We have plans for features and innovations, but opening the project this early will lead to a more robust and useful solution for all. We are happy to address issues, and are ready to accept pull requests. We’re also hopeful that with our adoption of these open source components from which Finch is composed, we’ll increase focus and attention on these components, and add more hands to the important work of open source maintenance and stewardship. In particular, Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker shared that “we’re bullish about Finch’s adoption of containerd and BuildKit, and we look forward to AWS working with us on upstream contributions.”
