Difference between docker pull complete vs download complete

Question

I know

pull complete

is reached after

download complete

in lifecycle but I am interested in knowing the difference between them. I tried searching internet but couldn't found anything clearly explaining the differences.

Answer 1

When pulling a remote docker image, you can see that the layers are downloaded. After a layer is downloaded, docker shows a status of extracting the image which is mainly uncompressing the layer and verifying its checksum. Once this is done the layer is maked with Pull complete.

So in short, Download complete means the layer is downloaded whereas Pull complete implies that the layer was downloaded and extracted onto the host machine.

Answer 2

There may not be any formal documentation about the difference between these messages, but you can always go directly to the source code: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/distribution/xfer/download.go

You can see in the source that it updates the status to "Pull complete" after calling archive.DecompressStream (during which the "Extracting" status is displayed).