Working with air‑gapped or offline environments is common in enterprise datacenters, especially when dealing with VMware, Harbor registries, or secure production networks. Tools like Carvel imgpkg are essential for moving OCI images, bundles, and Kubernetes artifacts — but installing them on a VM with no internet access can feel like a roadblock.

Step 1 — Download imgpkg on a Machine With Internet

On any machine with internet access (Windows, macOS, or Linux), run:

curl -L -o imgpkg-linux-amd64 \
  https://github.com/carvel-dev/imgpkg/releases/latest/download/imgpkg-linux-amd64

This pulls the latest Linux AMD64 binary directly from the official Carvel GitHub releases page.

If you prefer to browse manually, visit: https://github.com/carvel-dev/imgpkg/releases/latest (github.com in Bing)

Step 2 — Transfer imgpkg to the Offline Linux VM

You have a few options depending on your environment.

Option A — SCP (most common)

scp imgpkg-linux-amd64 user@<vm-ip>:/tmp/imgpkg

Option B — WinSCP (Windows GUI)

Drag and drop the file into /tmp/ on your VM.

Option C — USB / ISO (fully air‑gapped)

Mount the media and copy the file manually.

Step 3 — Install imgpkg on the Offline VM

SSH into your offline VM and run:

sudo mv /tmp/imgpkg /usr/local/bin/imgpkg
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/imgpkg

This places imgpkg in your system PATH so it can be executed globally.

Step 4 — Verify the Installation

imgpkg --version

You should see something like:

imgpkg version 0.39.0

If you see a version number, you’re ready to use imgpkg in your offline environment.