If you’ve been running OpenClaw on your host machine and quietly wondering what happens if an agent goes sideways, NanoClaw is the answer you’ve been looking for. This guide walks you through the basics of setting up NanoClaw — the new containerized OpenClaw alternative from Gavriel Cohen — so your agents run with minimal permissions and your host system stays protected.

What You’ll Need

  • Docker installed and running (Docker Engine 24+ or Docker Desktop)
  • Node.js 18+ (for the NanoClaw CLI)
  • An existing OpenClaw config or familiarity with SOUL.md/USER.md concepts
  • About 20 minutes

Step 1: Install NanoClaw

npm install -g nanoclaw

Verify the install:

nanoclaw --version

Step 2: Initialize a NanoClaw Project

NanoClaw uses a project directory structure similar to OpenClaw’s workspace model, but each agent gets its own container definition.

mkdir my-nanoclaw-agents
cd my-nanoclaw-agents
nanoclaw init

This creates a nanoclaw.config.json and a agents/ directory. You’ll define each agent as its own entry in the config.

Step 3: Define Your Agent’s Container

Open nanoclaw.config.json. A minimal agent definition looks like this:

{
  "agents": [
    {
      "name": "researcher",
      "image": "nanoclaw/base:latest",
      "soul": "./agents/researcher/SOUL.md",
      "mounts": [
        { "host": "./workspace/researcher", "container": "/workspace", "mode": "rw" }
      ],
      "network": "restricted",
      "allowedHosts": ["api.openai.com", "brave.com"],
      "env": ["OPENAI_API_KEY", "BRAVE_API_KEY"]
    }
  ]
}

Key fields to understand:

  • mounts — Only mount what the agent actually needs. mode: "rw" for its workspace, mode: "ro" for reference files it should read but not modify.
  • network: "restricted" — Blocks all outbound traffic by default.
  • allowedHosts — Whitelist only the external APIs this agent legitimately calls. Your SSH keys and local database are not in this list.
  • env — Pass environment variables explicitly. The container does not inherit your host environment.

Step 4: Write Your Agent’s SOUL.md

The soul file goes in agents/researcher/SOUL.md. This works the same as OpenClaw — it’s the personality and instructions file for the agent. The difference is that NanoClaw enforces limits at the container level, so your SOUL.md becomes the intention layer, not the safety layer.

# SOUL.md — Researcher Agent
You are a research assistant. Your job is to search the web and summarize findings.
You have access to Brave Search via your allowed hosts.
Write all output to /workspace/findings/.
You cannot access the host filesystem beyond /workspace.

Step 5: Run Your Agent

nanoclaw run researcher

NanoClaw pulls the base image (first run only), starts the container, mounts your workspace, and boots the agent. You’ll see output streamed to your terminal. The agent runs in isolation — if it tries to access a host it’s not allowed, the call fails with a network policy error logged to the NanoClaw audit log.

Step 6: Review the Audit Log

One of NanoClaw’s best features for security-conscious deployments is the built-in audit log:

nanoclaw logs researcher --audit

This shows every tool call, every outbound network attempt, every filesystem write — with timestamps. If something goes wrong (or if you’re just curious what your agent actually did), this is your paper trail.

Common Gotchas

“My OpenClaw skill doesn’t work in NanoClaw” — Some OpenClaw skills assume host-level access (spawning processes, reading ~/.config files, etc.). In NanoClaw, these will fail with permission errors. You’ll need to either refactor the skill or add explicit mounts. This is the intended behavior.

“The agent can’t reach an API I didn’t expect it to need” — Add the host to allowedHosts and restart. Check the audit log to identify which hosts it’s trying to reach before opening anything up.

“Performance feels slower than host-mode OpenClaw” — First-run image pull is the main delay. Subsequent starts are fast. If latency is a concern for interactive agents, consider the nanoclaw dev mode which keeps containers warm between runs.

Is This Worth the Complexity?

For hobby projects and local experimentation? Probably not — standard OpenClaw with sensible SOUL.md guardrails is fine. For production agents with access to real systems — email, code repositories, databases, customer data — the answer is yes. The extra configuration overhead is a one-time cost; the protection it provides is ongoing.

The Summer Yue incident was a one-time event too. Just not the good kind.

Sources:

  1. NanoClaw — The Register
  2. gavrielc/nanoclaw — GitHub
  3. NanoClaw Docker migration guide — DEV.to community

Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260301-0800

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