A setting to turn off the models.dev catalog download (offline and strict-network use) #4714

What happens

On v1.152.0, docker-agent run downloads the public model catalog from https://models.dev/api.json. That's pkg/modelsdev/store.go, fetchFromAPI. It caches the catalog for 24 hours in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/cagent/models_dev.json. When a deployment gives each session its own HOME, which is common when docker-agent runs as a sandboxed agent runtime, that means one download per new session per day.

The other outbound paths each have a switch:

• TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false for telemetry;
• DOCKER_AGENT_AUTO_UPDATE for self-update;
• DOCKER_AGENT_AUTO_INSTALL=false for tool install;
• --otel is opt-in.

The catalog download is the one an operator can't turn off.

Why a switch would be enough

The store already handles a failed or blocked download. loadDatabase falls back to the cache, and then to the snapshot embedded at build time (the behaviour #3165 made explicit). So a setting that skips the download and goes straight to cache-or-embedded would only formalise a path that already works.

That matters for deployments that must not make outbound calls beyond the model provider they configured: air-gapped installs, strict egress policies, or self-hosters who want only the calls they asked for.

Proposal

Something like DOCKER_AGENT_OFFLINE=1, or a narrower DOCKER_AGENT_MODELS_DEV=off. It would make getDatabase behave as allowFetch=false: cache if present, otherwise the embedded snapshot, and never the network.

We run docker-agent as one of the agent runtimes in the open-source HarnessRouter. For now, our docs tell self-hosters that it fetches from models.dev and that the host can be blocked. A switch would let us turn it off by default. Thanks for considering it.