stax inspect

Display an artifact's metadata and layer breakdown. Use this to understand what's inside an artifact before pushing, pulling, or materializing it.

Usage

stax inspect ghcr.io/myorg/agents/backend-engineer:3.1.0
stax inspect ghcr.io/myorg/agents/backend-engineer:3.1.0 --json
stax inspect ./.stax/artifacts

Accepts registry references (with tag or digest) or local artifact directories.

Options

Example output

Human-readable

Artifact: backend-engineer@3.1.0
  type: application/vnd.stax.agent.v1
  layers: 7
  total size: 11468 bytes
    application/vnd.stax.config.v1+json (1536 bytes) sha256:...
    application/vnd.stax.prompt.v1+markdown (2150 bytes) sha256:...
    application/vnd.stax.skills.v1.tar+gzip (4300 bytes) sha256:...

JSON output

The --json flag returns the structured inspection payload. For local artifact directories that includes { manifest, config }; for registry references it returns the remote inspection result.

stax inspect ghcr.io/myorg/agents/backend-engineer:3.1.0 --json | jq '.config.persona'

This is useful for scripting, CI pipelines, and building tools on top of stax artifacts.

What you can learn from inspect

• Identity — Artifact name and version when present in config
• Artifact type — The OCI artifact type recorded in the manifest
• Layer breakdown — Each layer's media type, size, and digest
• Config blob — Local artifact config content when present

Related commands

• stax diff — Compare two artifacts side by side
• stax extract — Extract layer contents to disk
• stax materialize — Translate the artifact into runtime files