Docker Containers & Compose AI Skill Guide (Claude)

Overview & Engine Architecture

Docker packages apps as immutable images and runs them as ephemeral containers on a host engine (containerd/Moby). BuildKit builds images with cache mounts and multi-stage targets; Compose declares multi-container graphs on a single host. Agents should treat images as versioned artifacts (digest-pinned bases), Compose as startup-order contracts (not “wait forever”), and secrets as runtime mounts—never committed layers.