awesome-copilot plugin's MCP server requires Docker for all consumers, with no fallback transport

Comienza con plugins/awesome-copilot/mcp.json y compara su declaración de stdio de Docker con los transportes documentados en el proyecto upstream mcp-dotnet-samples/awesome-copilot. Elige y configura un transporte predeterminado que no use Docker y que admita las herramientas de discovery; después, verifica la instalación y el inicio de las herramientas mediante Copilot CLI en un host sin Docker.

Summary

The awesome-copilot plugin's mcp.json (at plugins/awesome-copilot/mcp.json) only wires up the local-stdio transport, launched via:

"command": "docker",
"args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/microsoft/mcp-dotnet-samples/awesome-copilot:latest"]

This forces anyone who installs the awesome-copilot plugin as a Copilot CLI/marketplace consumer (not a contributor to this repo) to have Docker Desktop installed and running, just to use the search_instructions / load_instruction discovery tools. That's a heavy, unusual requirement for what's meant to be a lightweight "browse the marketplace" experience, and it fails ungracefully when Docker isn't present (program not found style errors, no fallback).

Why this matters now

This MCP server declaration was recently "activated" for the first time by github/awesome-copilot#2713 (fixing MCP discovery of mcp.json at the plugin root). Before that fix, this declaration was effectively dead (hidden .mcp.json, stripped manifest pointer), so no client ever actually tried to spawn it. Now that discovery works, every Copilot CLI user with this plugin installed hits the Docker requirement.

Suggestion

The upstream mcp-dotnet-samples/awesome-copilot project already documents alternative transports that don't require a local Docker install:

• A hosted Azure Container Apps endpoint (streamable-http transport), which the plugin's mcp.json could point to directly with a url instead of a command.
• A plain dotnet run local option (still avoids Docker, though it requires the .NET SDK).

Consider shipping the mcp.json with a streamable-http entry pointing at a hosted endpoint (or otherwise not requiring Docker) as the default, so installing this plugin doesn't implicitly require Docker Desktop for end users who just want to discover/install customizations.

Environment

Discovered via GitHub Copilot CLI (Windows), where the plugin's MCP server consistently fails to start with:

Failed to connect to MCP server "awesome-copilot": failed to spawn MCP server process: program not found: program not found.

because Docker isn't installed on the host.