Manage Mounts

How it works

NanoClaw isolates agents in containers — by default they can’t see anything on your host. The mount allowlist at ~/.config/nanoclaw/mount-allowlist.json is the explicit list of host directories that agents are allowed to access.

The /manage-mounts skill is a focused tool for editing that allowlist: view, add, remove, or reset.

What it does

• Show current config — pretty-prints the allowlist so you can see which directories are exposed and whether each is read-only or read-write.
• Add a directory — validates the path exists, asks whether it should be read-write or read-only (the safer default), and writes the updated config.
• Remove a directory — shows the current entries, asks which to remove, and writes the result.
• Reset to empty — clears the allowlist entirely.

No service restart is needed — the allowlist is read fresh when a container is spawned, so new mounts apply to newly spawned containers automatically. To apply the config to a group whose container is already running, the skill runs ncl groups restart --id <group-id>.

What gets mounted

Each entry in the allowlist has:

• path — an absolute host path (must exist when added).
• allowReadWrite — whether agents can write back (true = read-write; false, the safer default, = read-only). A legacy readOnly key is still tolerated and translated with a warning.

The read-only decision is per-directory — each allowedRoots entry gets its own setting.

Tips

• The allowlist is a security boundary, not a hint. Container agents physically cannot see host directories that aren’t in the list — Docker won’t bind-mount them.
• Adding ~/Documents exposes everything in there. Be specific: ~/Projects/foo is safer than ~.
• Read-only is the right default for most paths. Flip it to read-write only when an agent legitimately needs to modify files.
• For tools that need their own state directories (like ~/.gmail-mcp or ~/.calendar-mcp), put the parent dir in the allowlist so the tool can find its credentials and write its tokens.
• Skills that require host access (like /add-gmail-tool and /add-gcal-tool) check the allowlist as part of their pre-flight and tell you what’s missing.