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Your team already talks in Slack, Discord or Telegram, and you want to ask “which clusters have failing pods?” there rather than opening the portal. OpenClaw is an open-source gateway you host yourself that connects chat apps to an AI agent. Ankra does not ship or run OpenClaw. What Ankra provides is what the agent needs to work with Ankra: the ankra CLI and Ankra’s Agent Skills, installed where OpenClaw looks for skills. The agent runs ankra commands on the machine where the OpenClaw gateway runs, with the token you give that machine. It can do exactly what that token’s role allows, for anyone who can message it.
Looking for Hermes? An earlier version of this page used that name for this integration. Nous Research’s Hermes Agent is a separate open-source agent, available in the add-on catalogue as Hermes Agent.

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Prerequisites

  • OpenClaw installed and running, with at least one chat channel connected. Follow the OpenClaw documentation for both.
  • The Ankra CLI, v0.13.0 or later, installed on the machine that runs the OpenClaw gateway and on its PATH.
  • A service token for the assistant. Pick its role for what the assistant should be allowed to do: viewer gives read-only access plus ask-mode AI, and Ankra refuses anything that would change a cluster. See Roles & Access.

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Connect OpenClaw to Ankra

1

Give the gateway the token

Add the token to OpenClaw’s global environment file, ~/.openclaw/.env, on the gateway machine:
The CLI reads ANKRA_API_TOKEN when there is no saved login. See OpenClaw’s environment variables for the other places OpenClaw reads variables from, and their order.
2

Check the CLI works with that token

On the gateway machine, run a read with the same token:
You should see the organisation’s clusters. If you see someone else’s view, or a different organisation, a saved ankra login on this machine is taking precedence - see Troubleshooting.
3

Install the Ankra skills for OpenClaw

This copies the Ankra skills into ~/.openclaw/skills, one folder per skill, where OpenClaw discovers them itself. The skills ship inside the CLI binary, so they match the CLI version you installed. ankra skills list shows what is installed.
4

Restart OpenClaw

Restart the gateway so it loads the new skills.

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Verify

From a chat channel connected to OpenClaw, ask something that needs Ankra, for example:
The agent should run ankra commands on the gateway machine and answer from their output.

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Add a skill for one cluster (optional)

ankra openclaw skill writes a skill that names one cluster - its name, ID and portal link - and tells the agent to route changes to that cluster through Ankra rather than running them locally. It writes ~/.openclaw/skills/ankra-<cluster>/SKILL.md, the folder layout OpenClaw loads skills from:
Restart OpenClaw after writing it. --output <path> writes the file somewhere else. A cluster whose skill would take the name of a bundled Ankra skill (a cluster named cli would become ankra-cli) is refused; use --output for it. If an earlier CLI left a ~/.openclaw/skills/ankra-<cluster>.md file, delete it: OpenClaw never loaded it.

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Update and remove

The skills are versioned with the CLI. After upgrading the CLI, reinstall them:
To remove them:
To cut the assistant off from Ankra completely, revoke its token under Organisation → Service tokens.

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Troubleshooting