Extending OpenClaw with Skills and MCP

1. What Skills Are

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openclaw skills list

Skills (7/51 ready)

OpenClaw ships with a number of built-in skills, which you can view with openclaw skills list.

The concrete implementations of these Skills can be found at https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/tree/main/skills. A Skills file mainly describes the Skill’s metadata, when it applies, when it does not apply, and how to configure and use it.

2. Installing Skills with clawhub

ClawHub is the public Skills registry for OpenClaw. By default, Skills are installed into the ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills directory.

Search for a skill

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clawhub search "huggingface"

Install a skill

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clawhub install huggingface

After installation it may not necessarily be usable; run openclaw skills check to see whether any dependencies are missing.

View skill information

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clawhub list

Update a skill

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clawhub update huggingface

Uninstall a skill

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clawhub uninstall huggingface

View skill details

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clawhub inspect huggingface

Explore skills

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clawhub explore

This lists some of the most recently uploaded skills.

3. Adding an MCP Server

Install mcporter

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npm i -g mcporter

Add an MCP Server

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cd ~
mcporter config add ops-mcp-server --url http://localhost/mcp

mcporter automatically discovers MCP Server configurations in the current user, the current directory, and Cursor. Here we place it directly in the current user’s home directory.

Verify the result

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mcporter auth ops-mcp-server

If it does not succeed, you can edit the ~/config/mcporter.json file directly and add "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" }.

View the result

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mcporter list ops-mcp-server

You should be able to see the details of all the Tools.

Check whether mcporter is working

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openclaw skills list |grep mcporter

4. Adding a Skill to Help Use the MCP Server

Create the skill directory

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skills/
└── ops-mcp-server/
    ├── SKILL.md          # required: YAML metadata + Markdown usage guide
    ├── bins/             # optional: executables (added to PATH automatically)
    ├── references/       # optional: reference documents
    └── scripts/          # optional: helper scripts (Python, Bash, JS, etc.)

Modify the skill

Edit the ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/ops-mcp-server/SKILL.md file to change the skill name, description, usage, and so on.

Edits to SKILL.md take effect immediately, so you can debug and test at the same time.

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clawhub login

Upload the skill

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clawhub publish --name ops-mcp-server --version 1.0.2 ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/ops-mcp-server

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✔ OK. Published ops-mcp-server@1.0.0 (k97025m7pvqv099658egtm76n1821j6h)

The Version must be incremented with each update.

5. Using a Custom Skill

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openclaw agent --agent main --message "你能执行哪些 sops"

Alternatively, you can type 你能执行哪些 sops directly on the page, and either way the skill is triggered to call the MCP Server.

6. Summary

This post has mainly explained how to integrate an MCP Server into OpenClaw through Skills, covering the following parts:

Install mcporter and configure the MCP Server
Create a Skill that uses mcporter to describe MCP capabilities
Upload it to ClawHub so other users can use it

Of course, a Skill can also be a pure Prompt, or a script or executable plus some documentation.