Docker Sandbox for isolating AI coding agents is a great idea and I was excited to try it.
However, in its current version it has a major shortcoming - the setup completely ignores my user-level claude configuration, including all my installed plugins, skills, commands, rules, hooks, etc.
Even if I add a RO mount of my ~/.claude folder, it will not recognize it there because the HOME env was pointed to a different user directory where some Sandbox-specific Claude config was created.
So what I need to do now in order to actually work, is to move all my Claude setup into the correct places in the sandbox.
I am going to create a template for it, since that’s the only way I will be able to work on my multiple projects.
But I think this use case is so basic that it can’t be ignored - you don’t expect your users to forget about all their existing Claude setup and plugins in order to try your product.
Hello, Docker Sandboxes run the agent inside a sandbox VM as a separate non-root agent user, so the sandbox has its own $HOME (typically /home/agent) and its own user-level config space.
Today, docker sandbox run is documented to mount your workspace (and optional extra workspaces) at the same absolute path inside the sandbox; it doesn’t describe a supported way to remap a host folder like ~/.claude directly to $HOME/.claude inside the sandbox.
So a read-only mount of your host ~/.claude may not be discovered by Claude Code if it’s not located under the sandbox user’s $HOME.
Supported workaround (documented): If you need your Claude setup (plugins/rules/hooks) available consistently, the current documented approach is to create a custom template:
either build one from docker/sandbox-templates:claude-code, or
configure a sandbox once and reuse it by saving it as a template (docker sandbox save).
Product feedback: I agree this is a common workflow expectation (reuse host agent config). If you can share a minimal summary of what should be imported (e.g., ~/.claude contents) and whether it must be read-only vs read/write, it would be good feedback for the Sandboxes team.
~/.claude content is an obvious minimum, and it should be properly merged with whatever you predefined in the Sandbox to make things work smoothly.
I don’t know a single developer who works with Claude bare bones without some plugins or config.
I believe that organizations might have more requirements, such as merging the root config as well (./claude for all users).
Yes, I was going to work on a template since I don’t have a better solution, but I think this should come out of the box.
Also, I noticed that the Sandbox Claude initial setup doesn’t have even the official Anthropic plugins market.