Docker Best Practices

When to Use

Activate this skill when:

• Creating a new Dockerfile for a Python backend or React frontend
• Optimizing existing Docker images for smaller size or faster builds
• Setting up Docker Compose for local development
• Configuring multi-stage builds to separate build and runtime dependencies
• Hardening container security (non-root user, minimal base images)
• Running security scans on Docker images with Trivy
• Designing an image tagging strategy for CI/CD pipelines
• Troubleshooting Docker build failures or runtime issues

Do NOT use this skill for:

• Deployment orchestration or CI/CD pipelines (use deployment-pipeline)
• Kubernetes configuration or Helm charts
• Cloud infrastructure provisioning (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Application code patterns (use python-backend-expert or react-frontend-expert)