Building AI Agents with Docker Agent

Docker built its reputation on one idea: package software once, run it anywhere, the same way, every time. Docker Agent applies that same idea to AI agents: describe them in a declarative config instead of code, run them through a CLI plugin, and distribute them through the same OCI registries that already store your container images. If you've ever wished an AI agent could be defined, versioned, and shared like a container, that's the gap this tool fills.

This is a full, hands-on tutorial, from a completely bare install to a real, working multi-agent team.

What Is Docker Agent?

Docker Agent is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed CLI plugin built by Docker Engineering, installed and run as docker agent. Its own tagline states the goal plainly: run AI agents like containers. Its Go module history on pkg.go.dev shows early tagged releases from March 2026, and it's grown quickly since; the project has already passed 3,300 GitHub stars and nearly 10,000 commits.

It didn't appear out of nowhere. Docker spent 2025 building toward exactly this: a July 2025 announcement extended Docker Compose to support agents and AI models directly, and Docker Model Runner shipped as a way to run models locally without a cloud API key. Docker Agent is the product of that groundwork landing in one dedicated tool, rather than a single feature bolted onto Compose.

Prerequisites and Installing Docker Agent

You need three things: Docker installed on your machine, a way to actually run it, and access to at least one language model.

Installation has three real paths. If you're running Docker Desktop 4.63 or newer, the plugin is already there; just run docker agent.

Via Homebrew, brew install docker-agent installs the binary directly; run it as docker-agent, or symlink it to ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-agent to use the docker agent form instead.

For a binary release, download it directly from GitHub Releases and symlink it the same way.

docker agent --help

Building Your First Agent

Code explanation: