Dokku

What This Skill Does

The Dokku skill is a powerful automation wrapper for the Dokku PaaS, enabling OpenClaw to manage the entire lifecycle of applications on a Dokku host. Whether you are bootstrapping a new server or managing high-traffic web applications, this skill provides a structured interface to perform critical infrastructure tasks. It handles application creation, environment configuration, domain management, SSL certificate provisioning via Nginx, and process orchestration. By offloading complex CLI commands to this skill, users can interact with their deployments through natural language, reducing the barrier to entry for server management and minimizing human error during sensitive operations like container restarts or storage mounting.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw Hub CLI. Run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/akhil-naidu/dokku

Ensure that you have the dokku binary installed and accessible in the system PATH of the target environment. The skill relies on direct SSH access or local shell execution to perform its duties.

Use Cases

This skill is designed for DevOps engineers, developers, and system administrators who want to streamline their deployment pipelines. Key use cases include:

• Automated Deployments: Triggering container builds and deployments from git repositories or container images.
• Environment Management: Quickly injecting or modifying environment variables (config) for multiple apps simultaneously.
• Lifecycle Maintenance: Routine tasks such as restarting hung processes, rebuilding application containers, or pruning unused docker volumes to recover disk space.
• Security & Networking: Rapidly generating SSL certificates with the certs plugin and configuring custom domains or Nginx settings without manually editing configuration files.
• One-off Tasks: Running database migrations or maintenance scripts in the background without affecting the stability of the primary web process.

Example Prompts

1. "Dokku, deploy the latest image from my registry to the 'production-api' app."
2. "Please set the DATABASE_URL environment variable for my blog app and restart it to apply the changes."
3. "Run a cleanup of all stopped containers and prune unused images on the Dokku host."

Tips & Limitations

For long-running tasks, always prefer background execution. The Dokku host can be sensitive to timeout interruptions during heavy build phases, so the background: true flag is your best friend when deploying large images. Always verify your Nginx configuration after making major changes using the nginx:show-config command. Note that this skill requires the host machine to be properly authenticated if connecting via SSH. It is recommended to use SSH keys with an agent for seamless, passwordless operations. Avoid using this skill to manage manual system-level changes that conflict with Dokku's internal lifecycle management.