@portainer · 2 items
How to drive the Portainer MCP server's tools correctly — both reading and mutating. Reading: project responses with `select` (JMESPath), where the heavy fields live (snapshots, status blocks, managed fields), how to handle non-JSON Docker/K8s proxy endpoints (container and pod logs, stats, exec), and how to interpret results that are easy to misread (e.g. an edge environment's health comes from its heartbeat, not its `Status` field; typed K8s tools use different field names than the raw proxy). Mutating: deploying, scaling, restarting, and deleting Portainer-managed resources — where success payloads are empty and must be verified out-of-band, and where cleanup (orphaned volumes) and recovery (name-based vs id-based calls) have gotchas. Trigger this whenever you're about to call any Portainer MCP tool — including `docker_proxy`, `kubernetes_proxy`, `EndpointList`, `GetAllKubernetes*`, `StackList`, `StackCreateKubernetes*`, `StackDelete*`, `CreateKubernetes*`, `snapshot*`, `Helm*`, or any other `mcp__portainer__*` tool — and whenever the user asks you to inspect, deploy, scale, restart, or remove Docker containers/images/stacks/networks, Kubernetes resources, or Helm releases managed by Portainer. Use it even if the user doesn't mention Portainer by name, as long as the working answer requires one of these tools.
How to cut a portainer-mcp release that bumps the embedded Portainer OpenAPI spec to a new Portainer minor (e.g. 2.41.x → 2.42.x). Walks through finding the upstream patch target, regenerating the spec, recounting ops/tags per profile, refreshing the orphan-tag inventory, bumping version pins across the README and distribution docs, promoting CHANGELOG entries, committing, pushing, merging to main, and tagging — in that order. Trigger this skill whenever the user mentions cutting a release, bumping the Portainer version target, supporting a new Portainer minor, regenerating the spec, running `make specs` for a new minor, or any phrasing like "let's update for Portainer X.Y" — the spec regen is only the first step of a multi-file release and the model should consult this skill before touching anything.