inspect

sandwichcake inspect <ref> fetches a manifest and prints a human-readable report: what kind of object it is, its annotations, layers, and attached metadata files. Read-only.

What it shows

Kind — slice (manifest carries the com.github.baba.sandwichcake.kind = slice annotation), image, or index. For an index, every child manifest is inspected and indented underneath with its platform.
Annotations — all manifest annotations, sorted.
Layers — index, digest prefix, size, media type, plus sandwichcake annotations decoded inline (type=, name=, root=, part=, requires=, src=).
Metadata files — blobs found through the slice’s metadata artifact referrer, listed as meta: <title> (<media type>, <size>).
Platform — from config, or any for platform-agnostic slices.

$ sandwichcake inspect registry.example.com/ai/weights:qwen3-8b
slice  registry.example.com/ai/weights:qwen3-8b  sha256:3a1f…  [any]
  com.github.baba.sandwichcake.kind = slice
  com.github.baba.sandwichcake.platform = any
  [0] sha256:9be4…        4.9GiB  application/vnd.sandwichcake.weight.v1.tar
      type=weight name=qwen3-8b root=/models/qwen3-8b part=1/1 src=hf://Qwen/Qwen3-8B@main
  meta: files.json (application/json, 1284 B)

Flags

Flag	Description
`--json`	Emit the full report as JSON (kind, digest, annotations, layers, metadata, children)
`--file`	Print the raw content of a metadata file by its `title`

Examples

Extract the lock file a venv slice was built from:

sandwichcake inspect registry.example.com/ai/venv:torch-2.8 --file uv.lock

See what a compose actually contains:

sandwichcake inspect registry.example.com/ai/infer:v1

Pipe a report to jq:

sandwichcake inspect registry.example.com/ai/weights:qwen3-8b --json | jq '.Layers[].Annotations'

Notes

<ref> may be a tag or repo@sha256:….
inspect follows referrers — metadata files listed in the report can be fetched with --file <title> without knowing the artifact digest.
For multi-arch indexes, add --json and look at children for per-platform details.

plan diff