Guides

The guides walk through running PersonalClaw: installing it, getting a first conversation working, and the specific setups that come up early. They are task-shaped, so each one is meant to be followed start to finish rather than skimmed.

Read them in the order the list below gives. It is core’s own directory order, and installation comes first.

A guide tells you what to do; it does not enumerate every option. When you want the exact flag, config key or route rather than a walkthrough, reference is the section that has it. When you want to know why a subsystem behaves the way a guide says it does, that is architecture.

These pages are core’s text, published from the release this site was built from. If a guide’s instructions do not match the version you are running, check release provenance for which release that is — and if they do not match the release either, the correction belongs in core, which is where these files live.

The guides

• Automations you can leave alone — An automation is only useful if you can stop watching it.
• Build a channel app — A channel is a place a person talks to their assistant that is not the dashboard: a chat app, a DM, a mailbox.
• Working inside a chat — Most of what PersonalClaw does happens in one long conversation, and a long conversation needs more than a send button.
• Companion apps on your local network — A companion app is a phone or a second computer driving your gateway — the same dashboard, rendered on a different screen.
• Running PersonalClaw in containers — The published Docker images are a projection of the same release artifact as every other install path — the gateway image bundles the wheel (with the prebuilt dashboard) and the web image bundles the SPA behind an…
• The desktop app — PersonalClaw’s desktop shell is a thin Electron wrapper around the same gateway and dashboard you get in a browser.
• Getting started — PersonalClaw is a self-hosted personal AI agent: a local gateway process that serves a web dashboard, runs agents with tools/memory/skills, and connects to channels.
• Platforms — Where PersonalClaw runs and what to know per platform.
• Reaching your dashboard from outside your home network — By default PersonalClaw is a local program: it binds to your machine, and you get in with a token link (personalclaw token).
• Writing skills — A skill is a directory with a SKILL.md in it: a procedure you want the agent to follow the same way every time, stored as markdown instead of retyped into a prompt.
• Using PersonalClaw from your editor — Your editor’s assistant already has an MCP client in it.
• When PersonalClaw is not the right tool (yet) — Most projects tell you what they do.
• Authoring workflow templates — A template is a reusable workflow spec: a tree of typed nodes plus declared inputs and metadata.