Experimental Features - Buildpacks

+++ title="What are experimental features?" weight=8 +++

Certain features are considered experimental and susceptible to change in future API versions.

This means users will need to enable the experimental mode in order to use one of these features.

If using pack, run pack config experimental true, or add experimental = true to your ~/.pack/config.toml file to enable experimental features.

If using the lifecycle directly, set the CNB_EXPERIMENTAL_MODE environment variable.

The following features are experimental for pack:

building for Windows containers
exporting to OCI layout format on disk
Interacting with the buildpack registry
pack manifest commands
pack buildpack --flatten
pack build --interactive
When building, reading project metadata version & source URL from project.toml

The following features are experimental for lifecycle:

Building for Windows containers
Exporting to OCI layout format on disk

For more information and to look at an example of how this might be valuable, see Export to OCI layout format on disk.