Best Claude Code Skills for DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and CI

Infrastructure work is where a coding agent either saves you an afternoon or generates a Dockerfile that looks right and quietly does the wrong thing. The difference is whether Claude knows your conventions. A Skill is how you tell it — once — and have it apply every time you touch a manifest, a module, or a pipeline.

This roundup is aimed at the IT and infra side of the house: sysadmins, platform engineers, anyone running Docker, Kubernetes, or Terraform on Windows and WSL. For each area you’ll get what the skill should encode and an example description line, since the description is what decides whether the skill actually fires. If you’re new to the format, start with Claude Code Skills explained; for the broader, non-infra list see the best Claude Code Skills for 2026.

A note before the list: a skill guides Claude, it doesn’t enforce anything. It can tell the agent to plan before applying, but real guardrails come from Claude Code’s permission settings. Keep that distinction in mind, especially around anything that touches production.

Installable DevOps skill plugins to check first#

Before you write a custom skill, check whether a maintained plugin already covers the platform. Install only the rows that match your real stack.

If the platform plugin covers 80% of what you need, install it and add a small project skill for your local rules. If no plugin matches, build the custom skills below.

Docker skills#

What it should encode: your base images and why, multi-stage build structure, how you pin versions, non-root user requirements, label and tag conventions, and what should never end up in an image (secrets, build caches, dev dependencies). Without this, Claude defaults to whatever’s common online, which is rarely what your shop uses.

---
name: dockerfiles
description: Use when writing or editing Dockerfiles or docker-compose files. Enforces multi-stage builds, pinned base image tags, a non-root runtime user, and no secrets in layers.
---

Use it on any repo that ships a container. The payoff is consistency across services — every image built the same way, which makes them easier to scan, patch, and reason about.

Kubernetes skills#

What it should encode: your manifest conventions — resource requests and limits on every container, the labels your tooling depends on, namespace rules, probe configuration, and the safety habits you want enforced (never kubectl delete a namespace without confirmation, always --dry-run first). Manifests are verbose and easy to get subtly wrong, so a skill that knows your shape pays off fast.

---
name: k8s-manifests
description: Use when writing or editing Kubernetes YAML manifests. Requires resource limits, liveness and readiness probes, standard team labels, and dry-run before any apply.
---

Terraform skills#

What it should encode: module structure, naming and tagging standards, where state lives, required variables and outputs, and the non-negotiable rule of running terraform plan and reading it before any apply. Infrastructure-as-code mistakes are expensive because they’re real resources, so the planning discipline matters more here than almost anywhere.

---
name: terraform
description: Use when writing or changing Terraform configuration. Enforces module and tagging conventions, required tags on every resource, and always running plan and reviewing it before apply.
---

Use it on any repo that manages cloud resources. Pair it with a review habit — Claude proposes the change, you read the plan, then it applies.

CI/CD and GitHub Actions skills#

What it should encode: your pipeline structure, how jobs are split, caching strategy, where secrets come from (and that they never get echoed), required status checks, and your conventions for workflow file naming. CI config drifts easily across repos; a skill keeps new pipelines looking like the ones that already work.

---
name: github-actions
description: Use when writing or editing GitHub Actions workflows. Enforces pinned action versions, least-privilege permissions blocks, cached dependencies, and secrets via the secrets context only.
---

Use it whenever you add or change a pipeline. Pinning action versions and least-privilege permissions blocks are the two things most hand-written workflows skip, and a skill makes them automatic.

Shell and PowerShell hardening skills#

What it should encode: safe scripting defaults. For bash, set -euo pipefail, quoted variables, and no piping untrusted input into a shell. For PowerShell, strict mode, proper error handling, and avoiding plaintext credentials. This matters doubly on Windows and WSL, where you’re often switching between both shells in one workflow.

---
name: shell-hardening
description: Use when writing bash or PowerShell scripts. Enforces strict error handling, quoted variables, no plaintext secrets, and safe handling of external input.
---

# What the skill steers Claude toward, top of every bash script
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

Use it for any automation you’ll run unattended. A script that fails loudly on the first error beats one that limps forward after a failed step and corrupts something downstream.

Incident runbook skills#

What it should encode: your response process — how to triage, where the dashboards are, the order of escalation, the commands you run to gather state, and what you must capture for the postmortem. A runbook skill turns “what do we do again?” at 3 a.m. into a procedure Claude can walk through with you.

---
name: incident-runbook
description: Use during incident response or when diagnosing a production outage. Walks through triage steps, state-gathering commands, escalation order, and postmortem notes to capture.
---

Use it for the systems you actually get paged on. Keep the steps in the skill in sync with reality — a stale runbook is worse than none.

Where to start#

If you only build one, make it the area where a mistake costs the most — usually Terraform or Kubernetes. Encode the planning discipline, commit it to the repo, and let it apply on every change. Add Docker and CI skills next, since they touch every service.

Keep each skill narrow and its trigger distinct, and remember the division of labor: skills carry your conventions, settings carry your guardrails. For the foundations, see Claude Code Skills explained, and for the wider Windows-and-WSL setup that surrounds all of this, the Claude Code setup for sysadmins.