Automation fails to run tests due to missing Docker daemon in environment

[mauri870]

Saw this in an Issue Triage workflow.

The automation attempted to run Go tests to verify a failure, but could not proceed because the test requires running a Docker container, and the environment does not have a Docker daemon available.

[mauri870]

cc @strawgate

[strawgate]

Allowing docker access means disabling the sandbox which we don't want to do for automated workflows

The issue triage workflow is the auto respond workflow, when you mention /ai or @claude that's the mention-in-issue workflow. Would you be okay with no docker on fully automatic triage but docker access allowed when tagging claude or /ai from a comment?

[github-actions]

Claude finished @strawgate's task in 1m 30s —— View job

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Response

• Gather repository context
• Understand the workflow architecture
• Respond to the question about Docker access approach

Yes, that approach makes sense and aligns with the existing architecture in this repository.

Current workflow variants:

Workflow	Trigger	Sandbox
issue-triage	issues.opened (automatic)	✅ Enabled
mention-in-issue	/ai or @claude comment	✅ Enabled
mention-in-issue-no-sandbox	/ai or @claude comment	❌ Disabled (Docker access)

The security rationale is sound:

1. Automatic workflows (issue-triage) should remain sandboxed because they run without human intervention. An attacker could craft a malicious issue that exploits the environment if Docker/network access were available.

2. User-invoked workflows (mention-in-issue-no-sandbox) have an explicit trust boundary - a trusted user (based on author_association checks) must deliberately invoke the agent. The trust shifts from "trust the input" to "trust the invoker."

For consuming repos like elastic/beats:

• Install mention-in-issue-no-sandbox.yml (Docker-enabled variant) for interactive use cases where tests need Docker
• Keep issue-triage.yml sandboxed for automatic triage

This is the design pattern the -no-sandbox workflow variants were created for - they explicitly document the tradeoff in their README:

⚠️ Security note: Disabling the agent sandbox removes the network firewall and filesystem isolation that the sandboxed variant provides. Use only when Docker access is required.

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[mauri870]

The issue triage workflow is the auto respond workflow, when you mention /ai or @claude that's the mention-in-issue workflow. Would you be okay with no docker on fully automatic triage but docker access allowed when tagging claude or /ai from a comment?

Thanks for clarifying the reasoning behind this. I'm good with that.

[github-actions]

This issue was labeled stale on 2026-07-28 and has had no further activity for 30 days. Closing automatically. If this issue is still relevant, please reopen it.

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What is this? | From workflow: Trigger Stale Issues Remediator

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