Mistral

Use Mistral AI models with docker-agent.

Overview

Mistral AI provides powerful language models through an OpenAI-compatible API. docker-agent includes built-in support for Mistral as an alias provider.

Setup

Get an API key from Mistral Console
Set the environment variable:
```
export MISTRAL_API_KEY=your-api-key
```

Usage

Inline Syntax

The simplest way to use Mistral:

agents:
  root:
    model: mistral/mistral-large-latest
    description: Assistant using Mistral
    instruction: You are a helpful assistant.

Named Model

For more control over parameters:

models:
  mistral:
    provider: mistral
    model: mistral-large-latest
    temperature: 0.7
    max_tokens: 8192

agents:
  root:
    model: mistral
    description: Assistant using Mistral
    instruction: You are a helpful assistant.

Available Models

Model	Description	Context
`mistral-large-latest`	Most capable Mistral model	128K
`mistral-medium-latest`	Balanced performance and cost	128K
`mistral-small-latest`	Fast and cost-effective (default)	128K
`codestral-latest`	Optimized for code generation	32K
`open-mistral-nemo`	Open-weight model	128K
`ministral-8b-latest`	Compact 8B parameter model	128K
`ministral-3b-latest`	Smallest Mistral model	128K

Check the Mistral Models documentation for the latest available models.

Auto-Detection

When you run docker agent run without specifying a config, docker-agent automatically detects available providers. If MISTRAL_API_KEY is set and higher-priority providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) are not available, Mistral will be used with mistral-small-latest as the default model.

Extended Thinking

docker-agent’s thinking_budget field is not applied to Mistral models: the underlying OpenAI-compatible client only sends reasoning_effort for OpenAI reasoning model names (o-series, gpt-5). Setting thinking_budget on a Mistral model passes config validation but has no effect on the request.

Mistral reasoning models (e.g. magistral) reason on their own without configuration. For non-reasoning models, use the think tool instead.

How It Works

Mistral is implemented as a built-in alias in docker-agent:

API Type: OpenAI-compatible (openai_chatcompletions)
Base URL: https://api.mistral.ai/v1
Token Variable: MISTRAL_API_KEY

This means Mistral uses the same client as OpenAI, making it fully compatible with all OpenAI features supported by docker-agent.

Example: Code Assistant

agents:
  coder:
    model: mistral/codestral-latest
    description: Expert code assistant
    instruction: |
      You are an expert programmer using Codestral.
      Write clean, efficient, well-documented code.
      Explain your reasoning when helpful.
    toolsets:
      - type: filesystem
      - type: shell
      - type: think

← Previous Docker Model Runner Next → xAI (Grok)