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New releaseSep 18, 2026

syft v1.52.0

CLI tool and library for generating a Software Bill of Materials from container images and filesystems

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Syft

A CLI tool and Go library for generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) from container images and filesystems. Exceptional for vulnerability detection when used with a scanner like Grype.

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syft-demo

Features

[!TIP] New to Syft? Check out the Getting Started guide for a walkthrough!

Installation

The quickest way to get up and going:

curl -sSfL https://get.anchore.io/syft | sudo sh -s -- -b /usr/local/bin

[!TIP] See Installation docs for more ways to get Syft, including Homebrew, Docker, Scoop, Chocolatey, Nix, and more!

The basics

See the packages within a container image or directory:

# container image
syft alpine:latest

# directory
syft ./my-project

To get an SBOM, specify one or more output formats:

# SBOM to stdout
syft <image> -o cyclonedx-json

# Multiple SBOMs to files
syft <image> -o spdx-json=./spdx.json -o cyclonedx-json=./cdx.json

Local containers-storage images

On Linux, syft can scan images from a local containers-storage store (e.g. built with Buildah or Podman) when asked explicitly; plain image references never look there:

syft --from containers-storage localhost/myimage:latest

# rootless stores must be read from inside the builder's user namespace
podman unshare syft --from containers-storage localhost/myimage:latest

This is included in the Linux release binaries. When building from source, add -tags containers_image_openpgp,exclude_graphdriver_btrfs.

[!TIP] Check out the Getting Started guide to explore all of the capabilities and features.

Want to know all of the ins-and-outs of Syft? Check out the CLI docs, configuration docs, and JSON schema.

Contributing

We encourage users to help make these tools better by submitting issues when you find a bug or want a new feature. Check out our contributing overview and developer-specific documentation if you are interested in providing code contributions.

Syft development is sponsored by Anchore, and is released under the Apache-2.0 License. The Syft logo by Anchore is licensed under CC BY 4.0

For commercial support options with Syft or Grype, please contact Anchore.

Come talk to us!

The Syft Team holds regular community meetings online. All are welcome to join to bring topics for discussion.

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