portainer

What This Skill Does

The Portainer Skill is a robust interface for OpenClaw agents to interact directly with the Portainer REST API. It effectively turns your AI agent into a DevOps engineer, allowing it to oversee, manage, and troubleshoot your Docker infrastructure without human intervention. The skill provides a comprehensive toolkit for inspecting endpoints, monitoring container states, managing stack lifecycles, and triggering git-based redeployments. Whether you need to restart a stuck container, verify the health of a production service, or push an update from a repository, this skill enables seamless container orchestration.

Installation

Installation is straightforward but requires access to your Portainer instance. First, ensure you have an API-ready Portainer environment (v2.x). Navigate to your Portainer UI, head to 'My Account', and generate a personal access token. Add this token, along with your Portainer base URL, to your ~/.clawdbot/.env configuration file. Install the skill into your OpenClaw environment by running 'clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/asteinberger/portainer'. Once installed, the agent will verify the connection through the 'status' command, confirming connectivity before performing any operational tasks.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for automated infrastructure maintenance. Use it to perform automated health checks on your services, where the agent periodically monitors container status and restarts them if they fail. It is also ideal for CI/CD workflows, where an agent detects a push to a git repository and triggers a 'redeploy' command to pull the latest changes. Finally, it serves as a powerful incident response tool, allowing the agent to fetch logs during an outage, diagnose the issue, and communicate findings directly to you.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the status of all Docker containers on the production endpoint and report any that are not running."
2. "Redeploy the minecraft stack because the latest update was just pushed to GitHub."
3. "Show me the last 50 lines of logs for the cora-web container to see why it is throwing 500 errors."

Tips & Limitations

Always exercise caution when executing stop or redeploy commands on production environments. Ensure your API token is scoped correctly to minimize impact if compromised. Keep in mind that stack management relies on Portainer's internal ID system; use the 'stacks' command to list IDs before attempting to perform operations on specific services. For complex environments, consider configuring multiple endpoints to keep your dev and production workflows cleanly separated.