Orbstack Best Practices

The orbstack-best-practices skill provides a curated set of commands and workflows to optimize your local development environment using OrbStack. It streamlines container management, network configuration, and system resource handling for macOS users leveraging this virtualization tool.

When to use it

• You need to quickly start or stop Docker containers without manual CLI navigation.
• Your application requires specific network ports that need forwarding through the OrbStack gateway.
• You want to ensure your local environment matches production by utilizing consistent container images.
• You are managing multiple services and need a standardized way to reset or clean up resources.

Key capabilities

• Automated container lifecycle management (start, stop, restart).
• Dynamic port mapping for local development services.
• Environment variable configuration for containers.
• Resource monitoring and cleanup utilities.
• Integration with standard Docker CLI commands via OrbStack's enhanced runtime.

Example prompts

• "Use the orbstack-best-practices skill to start a PostgreSQL container on port 5432."
• "Reset all running containers and clear unused volumes in my current workspace."
• "Configure a new container with custom environment variables for API keys."

Tips & gotchas

Ensure OrbStack is installed and running as a background service before invoking these commands. Some features may require elevated privileges depending on your macOS security settings; if permission errors occur, check system preferences or use sudo where explicitly supported by the skill's implementation.