AI Skills

The Docker lexicon ships two AI skills that give coding agents operational knowledge about Docker Compose and Dockerfile patterns without requiring manual explanation.

Installation

Skills are installed automatically when you scaffold a project:

chant init --lexicon docker my-project

To refresh skills after a lexicon update:

chant update

Skill: chant-docker

Core Docker lexicon usage:

• Resource types — Service, Volume, Network, Config, Secret, Dockerfile
• Build — chant build src --lexicon docker -o docker-compose.yml
• Lint — chant lint src/ + post-synth checks
• Variable interpolation — env() with required/default semantics
• Default labels — defaultLabels() scope and merge

Skill: chant-docker-patterns

Common patterns and composition:

• Database services with health checks and named volumes
• Redis cache, Nginx reverse proxy
• Multi-stage Dockerfiles
• Secret management with env() and Docker secrets
• Service networking with named networks

MCP integration

The lexicon provides MCP tools usable by AI agents programmatically:

Tool	Description
build	Build the chant project
lint	Run lint rules
explain	Summarize project resources
scaffold	Generate starter files
search	Search available resource types
diff	Show changes between builds

LSP integration

Via chant serve lsp:

• Completions — type new to get Docker resource completions
• Hover — hover over type names to see Compose/Dockerfile serialization hints