Shipwright is a Kubernetes framework for building container images from source code using pluggable build strategies. It defines a set of CRDs, primarily Build, BuildRun, and BuildStrategy, that let platform teams describe how to turn a Git repository into an OCI image without committing to any single build tool.
Under the hood, Shipwright compiles a BuildRun into a Tekton TaskRun that executes the selected strategy. Out of the box it supports Buildpacks, Kaniko, BuildKit, Buildah, ko, and Source-to-Image, each wrapped as a ClusterBuildStrategy. Because strategies are CRDs themselves, platform engineers can fork, extend, or write new ones, and application developers reference them by name without knowing the underlying tool.
Shipwright slots into CI/CD systems alongside Tekton Pipelines, Argo CD, and OpenShift Pipelines, and is the upstream project behind OpenShift Builds v2. It is useful for teams that want a consistent, declarative image-building API on Kubernetes while keeping flexibility about which builder runs underneath.
