Support for generic gateway

[Bennoo]

What you'd like to see

I would like to be able to set as environment variable a custom gateway URL supporting the OpenAI API scheme.
This env variable + the token can makes me able to use my company AI gateway.

Why you'd like to see it

My company have multiple models behind an internal gateway. I would like to use it.

[mfranzon]

I have a similar use case, can I work on this feature and then see if it matches the requirements?

[Bennoo]

Do you ask me ?
Because if yes, I assume everybody can work on an issue!
I would be happy to help if needed

[mfranzon]

Do you ask me ? Because if yes, I assume everybody can work on an issue! I would be happy to help if needed

It was a question for the docker team just to know if could be interesting having this feature in place. But in any case thank you for being available to help me in this!

[rumpl]

How would you see this work?

You can already re-define the base url to any provider, see here for an example: https://github.com/docker/cagent/blob/main/examples/dmr.yaml#L14

In your case, instead of “dmr” you would put “openai”. Is that enough?

I guess it’s harder to share agents externally with your gateway in there, not sure if you plan on having these agents also be available to others outside of your company

[Bennoo]

You are right, it will not be shareable as is. In my personal use case, I don't look at sharing these agents but it should stay robust and well designed.

In my view, the configuration and the agent definitions should stay separated.
I’m thinking of something similar to the openai CODEX-CLI config file, where you can define model providers explicitly.

Something like this:

model_provider = "Azure"


[model_providers.azure]
name = "Azure"
base_url = "https://YOUR_PROJECT_NAME.openai.azure.com/openai"
env_key = "AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY"

You’d define each provider’s configuration, then set one as active.
That way, the configuration remains outside the agent definition itself. You can share the agents but the config should be set for each user.

Just thinking out loud here — maybe not the best approach, but it could help keep things cleaner and more modular.

What do you all think?