Command reference
stax extract
Extract canonical layer contents to disk for debugging
Extract the raw canonical layers from an artifact to a directory. Unlike stax materialize which translates content through an adapter, extract dumps the unmodified layer contents exactly as they exist in the OCI artifact — useful for debugging, auditing, and understanding what a build produced.
Usage
stax extract ghcr.io/myorg/agents/backend-engineer:3.1.0 ./output/
stax extract ./.stax/artifacts ./output/What gets extracted
The current reference CLI writes an OCI-style directory containing the manifest plus content-addressed blobs:
output/
├── manifest.json
└── blobs/
└── sha256/
├── 1f3d...
├── 4a2b...
└── b91c...Extract vs. materialize
stax extract | stax materialize | |
|---|---|---|
| Output format | Canonical stax layers | Runtime-native files |
| Adapter | None — raw content | Translates via adapter |
| Use case | Debugging, auditing | Using the artifact |
When to use extract
- Debugging builds — Verify that the built artifact contains what you expect
- Auditing — Inspect the exact content of a third-party artifact before trusting it
- Diffing manually — Extract two versions and use standard diff tools to compare
Related commands
stax inspect— View metadata without extracting filesstax diff— Compare two artifacts programmaticallystax materialize— Translate through an adapter instead