Agent skills

Two features need your agent to know a convention: asking you a question as a dialog, and sending you an image or file. Two skills in this repo teach it both; install them on the Gateway host.

Applies to: Pipe

Why the agent needs teaching

The integration provides the mechanism, but nothing tells your model it exists, so out of the box the agent will never use these:

Feature	The agent must	Otherwise
Ask-user dialog	Start a line with OpenClaw needs input:	It calls its own ask tool, which never reaches you here
Send an image or file	Emit MEDIA:<path>	It describes the file instead of showing it

The two skills

They live in skills/:

• openclaw-owui-ask-user: ask the user a question that pops a real dialog in Open WebUI, using the OpenClaw needs input: marker.
• openclaw-owui-media: show an image or file in the chat by emitting a MEDIA: line with the file's path on the Gateway host, or a bare filename.

Install them

Install them on the Gateway host, which is where the agent runs and is not always where Open WebUI runs. In a clone of this repo on the Gateway host:

openclaw skills install ./skills/openclaw-owui-ask-user
openclaw skills install ./skills/openclaw-owui-media

Or let the installer do it, in the same checkout:

uv run install.py skills

It needs no Open WebUI credentials. It detects the local openclaw CLI and installs every skill under skills/. If the CLI isn't there, the Gateway is usually on another machine: it says so, installs nothing, and prints the commands to run there instead.

Update them

git pull, then re-run the same command with overwrite turned on. In the repo checkout on the Gateway host:

uv run install.py skills --force

or, per skill:

openclaw skills install ./skills/openclaw-owui-ask-user --force
openclaw skills install ./skills/openclaw-owui-media --force

Without --force, a skill that is already installed fails with "already present? re-run with --force to overwrite".

Overwriting is opt-in on purpose: OpenClaw keeps no history for skill installs, so an overwrite is unrecoverable, and a skill you wrote yourself should never be clobbered by an installer.

Without the skills

If you would rather not install anything, put the two conventions in your agent's own instructions. The skills are only a convenient carrier.

On two machines, the media convention needs one more thing: the file has to reach the Pipe's media directory on the Open WebUI host. See two hosts.