Work with AI

Outport provides an official skill for AI coding agents, so they know how to configure ports, set up outport.yml, and troubleshoot your dev environment.

Install the Skill

npx skills add steveclarke/outport/skills

This works with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and other agents that support the skills protocol.

Example Prompts

Once installed, your AI agent understands Outport's config format, commands, and conventions. Try prompts like:

Set up a new project:

"Set up outport for this project. We have a Rails API, Postgres, and Redis."

Add a service to an existing config:

"Add a Nuxt frontend to our outport.yml. It needs to know the Rails API URL for server-side fetches and the browser-facing URL for CORS."

Diagnose issues:

"My .test domains stopped working. Can you figure out what's wrong?"

Configure a monorepo:

"We have a Rails backend and two Nuxt frontends in a monorepo. Each app has its own .env file. Set up outport so they can discover each other's URLs."

Share with a teammate:

"I need to share my local dev server with a teammate. Set up a public URL."

What's Included

The skill covers:

• outport.yml configuration — services, hostnames, preferred ports, env files
• Computed values — template syntax, url vs url:direct, per-file overrides, ${instance} variable
• All CLI commands — up, down, status, open, share, doctor, system start/stop/restart
• Multi-instance workflows — worktrees, renaming, promoting
• Troubleshooting — DNS, daemon, certificates, port conflicts

Machine-Readable Output

Every outport command supports --json for structured output that agents can parse:

outport status --json     # current port allocations and health
outport doctor --json     # system health check results
outport up --json         # allocation results after setup

Agents use this to read your project's port map, verify system health, and confirm changes without parsing terminal output.

Full Stack Orchestration

For running your entire dev environment — database, web servers, background workers — see Running Your Dev Stack. It covers process-compose, health checks, and headless operation for AI agents.