Docker Announces Docker+Wasm Technical Preview: Integrating WebAssembly with Containers

Docker announced the first technical preview of Docker+Wasm, a collaboration with the Bytecode Alliance and WasmEdge that introduces a new containerd shim to replace the standard runC runtime with a WasmEdge runtime for executing WebAssembly modules.

The Bytecode Alliance, founded by Mozilla, Fastly, Intel and Red Hat, promotes WebAssembly standardization and is actively advancing WASI to enable safe system‑resource access outside browsers.

Docker+Wasm enables developers to quickly build applications targeting the Wasm runtime, offering faster container startup, smaller binary size, and improved execution speed compared with traditional Linux containers.

To try the preview, run the following command:

docker run -dp 8080:8080 --name=wasm-example --runtime=io.containerd.wasmedge.v1 --platform=wasi/wasm32 michaelirwin244/wasm-example

Key flags:

--runtime=io.containerd.wasmedge.v1 – tells Docker Engine to use the Wasm containerd shim instead of the standard Linux runtime.

--platform=wasi/wasm32 – selects the WASI/wasm32 architecture, allowing a single image to run on any platform via the Wasm runtime.

The technical preview can be downloaded as Docker Desktop preview builds for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows AMD64, and Linux (Arm64 and AMD64) in both .deb, .rpm and tar formats.

Because Docker+Wasm is still in early preview, it is not recommended for production use as the APIs and behavior may change or be removed in future releases.

For more details, see the official documentation at https://docs.docker.com/desktop/wasm/ .