How to Connect MCP Servers to Claude Desktop with Docker MCP Toolkit (www.docker.com)

Docker’s MCP Toolkit lets Claude Desktop move from a reasoning assistant to a hands-on development partner by bridging Claude (the LLM) to containerized tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). By enabling the MCP Toolkit in Docker Desktop and connecting Claude Desktop, a small config entry is added (claude_desktop_config.json) that runs docker mcp gateway run to start a gateway routing requests from Claude to enabled MCP servers (Firecrawl, GitHub, Sequential Thinking, Context7, Node.js Sandbox, etc.). The result: Claude can create repos, run tests, scrape sites, manage Kubernetes, and more — all inside isolated Docker containers so nothing touches your host machine and every run is reproducible and auditable. The article demos a screenshot→production-ready React component workflow: Claude analyzes a screenshot, generates code and Jest tests, uses a Node.js Sandbox MCP to run tests in ephemeral containers, iterates with Sequential Thinking until green, then pushes to GitHub. Key technical details: the Node.js Sandbox uses a Docker-out-of-Docker pattern by mounting /var/run/docker.sock to spawn sibling containers (images like node:lts-slim) with limits (≈512 MB RAM, 0.75 CPU) and persists output to ~/Desktop/sandbox-output. That architecture boosts speed and reproducibility but carries privilege risks (docker.sock = host-level access), so it’s recommended for local dev with vulnerability scanning (Docker Scout) and caution before production use.