Nanoclaw

An AI assistant that runs agents securely in their own containers. Lightweight, built to be easily understood and completely customized for your needs.

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Agents in Slack: one app per agent

Setup provisions each agent its own Slack app: manifest, avatar, and workspace install, no tokens to paste. Spawn teammates from chat: every one gets its own bot identity, container, and memory, with shared rooms and canvases.

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Why I Built NanoClaw

OpenClaw is an impressive project, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep if I had given complex software I didn't understand full access to my life. OpenClaw has nearly half a million lines of code, 53 config files, and 70+ dependencies. Its security is at the application level (allowlists, pairing codes) rather than true OS-level isolation. Everything runs in one Node process with shared memory.

NanoClaw provides that same core functionality, but in a codebase small enough to understand: one process and a handful of files. Agents run in their own Linux containers with filesystem isolation, not merely behind permission checks.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/nanocoai/nanoclaw.git nanoclaw-v2
cd nanoclaw-v2
bash nanoclaw.sh

nanoclaw.sh walks you from a fresh machine to a named agent you can message. It installs Node, pnpm, and Docker if missing, installs a credential gateway and registers your Anthropic credential with it, builds the agent container, and pairs your first channel (Slack, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, or a local CLI). If a step fails, Claude Code is invoked automatically to diagnose and resume from where it broke.

Migrating from NanoClaw v1?

Run from a fresh v2 checkout next to your v1 install:

git clone https://github.com/nanocoai/nanoclaw.git nanoclaw-v2
cd nanoclaw-v2
bash migrate-v2.sh

migrate-v2.sh finds your v1 install (sibling directory, or NANOCLAW_V1_PATH=/path/to/nanoclaw), migrates state into the v2 checkout, then execs into Claude Code to finish the parts that need judgment (owner seeding, shared-memory migration, fork-customisation replay).

Run the script directly, not from inside a Claude session — the deterministic side needs interactive prompts and real shell I/O for Node/pnpm bootstrap, Docker, the credential gateway, and the container build.

What it does: merges .env, seeds the v2 DB from registered_groups, copies group folders + session data + scheduled tasks, installs the channel adapters you select, copies channel auth state (including the Baileys keystore for WhatsApp — LID mapping is now resolved per-message by the Baileys v7 adapter, not migrated), builds the agent container.

What it doesn't: flip the system service. Pick "switch to v2" at the prompt, or do it manually after testing — your v1 install is left untouched.

See docs/v1-to-v2-changes.md for what's different and docs/migration-dev.md for development notes.

Philosophy

Small enough to understand. One process, a few source files and no microservices. If you want to understand the full NanoClaw codebase, just ask Claude Code to walk you through it.