Docker
Lets an agent manage containers, images, and compose stacks, useful for spinning up services and reading container logs.
What it does
Docker's MCP Gateway does two things. It gives an agent container management, listing containers, reading logs, starting and stopping services, and running compose stacks. It also acts as a single gateway in front of other MCP servers running as containers, which is a tidy way to manage several servers at once.
Setup
Recent Docker Desktop versions ship the gateway. From a terminal:
docker mcp gateway run
Then point your agent at the gateway rather than at each server individually. Docker Desktop also exposes a catalogue of containerised servers you can enable from the UI.
What to watch out for
Container management is powerful and destructive. Removing a container or pruning volumes deletes data with no prompt.
Running MCP servers as containers is genuinely a security improvement over running them directly on your machine, because a compromised server is confined to the container rather than sitting on your filesystem with your credentials.
The gateway pattern also means one connection instead of a dozen, which keeps your tool list, and therefore your context cost, smaller.
