The Dag Explorer overlay provides a lightweight browser for fetching image manifests and listing repository tags from any OCI registry.

Dag Explorer is not limited to GitHub projects. You can inspect images from any publicly accessible registry by supplying the full reference. The following example uses the stargz‑containers Node image hosted on GitHub Container Registry:

https://oci.dag.dev/?image=ghcr.io/stargz-containers/node:13.13.0-esgz

Opening this link displays the image manifest and lets you browse its layers just like Docker Hub images.

You can explore the same image using the local Dag Explorer or the hosted version on oci.dag.dev.

Local server example:

http://127.0.0.1:5000/image/ubuntu/dev:TAE-254

This page links each layer to:

http://127.0.0.1:5000/layers/ubuntu/dev:TAE-254@sha256:2eb5ae5626329845e85d70a53694a99165471ae7970435ed4d4bad24933d963c/

Hosted equivalent:

https://oci.dag.dev/?image=ubuntu/dev:TAE-254

Layers open to:

https://oci.dag.dev/layers/ubuntu/dev:TAE-254@sha256:2eb5ae5626329845e85d70a53694a99165471ae7970435ed4d4bad24933d963c/

Dag Explorer intentionally issues HTTP range requests to peek inside layer blobs. When about 32 KiB of uncompressed data before a target offset is available, the gzip stream can be repositioned to read arbitrary sections. Storing only ~1% of a layer allows directory listings without downloading the entire archive. As a result the data may appear as an "invalid tar" when viewed in full, but this is expected behavior.