Why should you care?

Dev, CI, and staging must run identical AI stacks — mismatched SK versions cause works-on-my-machine agent failures.

See it live — copy this example

Paste into an ASP.NET Core 8+ / AgentNest project, then run with dotnet run (set your API keys in user-secrets).

# AgentNest.Api/Dockerfile
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0 AS base
WORKDIR /app
EXPOSE 8080
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:8.0 AS build
WORKDIR /src
COPY . .
RUN dotnet publish AgentNest.Api/AgentNest.Api.csproj -c Release -o /app/publish
FROM base
COPY --from=build /app/publish .
HEALTHCHECK CMD curl -f http://localhost:8080/health/ready || exit 1
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "AgentNest.Api.dll"]

What happened?

• Multi-stage build publishes Release output on ASP.NET 8 runtime with /health/ready probe for orchestrators.
• Follow the steps below — typing the code yourself is the fastest way to learn.

Practice next

1. Add Dockerfile to AgentNest.Api project.
2. docker build -t agentnest-api:local .
3. Pass OpenAI keys via docker run -e or compose secrets.
4. Add non-root USER in final stage.
5. Mount appsettings via Docker config for local Qdrant URL.

Remember

Containerize AgentNest API on aspnet:8.0 runtime. Use multi-stage builds and health checks. Inject secrets at runtime, never COPY into image.

Consistent agent CI

CI pipeline runs integration tests against containerized API and Qdrant.

Outcome: Same Docker image promotes from test to staging with unchanged SK dependencies.