Crate - a daemonless container runtime I built in Go to learn how Docker works

Hey folks,

I’ve been working on Crate for the past few weeks. It’s a small daemonless container runtime written in Go for Linux.

The goal was to understand how container runtimes work under the hood instead of treating Docker/Podman as magic. It launches containers directly, stores state on disk, and supports both rootless and rootful execution.

Currently, it supports the core pieces of a basic container runtime:

pulling and running Docker Hub images
container lifecycle commands like run, create, start, stop, ps, logs, and rm
Linux namespaces for process, mount, hostname, user, and network isolation
root filesystem setup with pivot_root / chroot
bind mounts, image env/CMD/entrypoint handling, and interactive PTYs
rootless private networking with pasta and port publishing (doesn't support networking in root gonna add that soon)

I’ve also written a small guide/docs series for anyone else who wants to understand or build something similar: docs

It’s still experimental and not production-ready. Big missing pieces include cgroups/resource limits, stronger security hardening, full OCI compliance, better registry support, multi-platform support and probably a million other things that Im forgetting.

Repo: https://github.com/aayushkdev/crate/

I’m still improving it, so I’d love to hear feedback, ideas, or suggestions. If you like the project, a star on GitHub would mean a lot.

https://redd.it/1tyk9r0
@r_linux