Mount Data Directories

Pinchy agents can only access files inside the /data/ directory in the container. To make your documents available, you mount host directories into subdirectories of /data/ using Docker volumes.

The /data/ convention

All agent-accessible files live under /data/ inside the OpenClaw container. Pinchy’s pinchy-files plugin runs inside OpenClaw and reads files from that path. The pinchy-data named volume is mounted there by default, but you can bind-mount additional host directories as subdirectories.

This convention provides a clear boundary: anything under /data/ is potentially accessible to agents (depending on their permissions), and nothing outside /data/ is.

Adding volumes in docker-compose.yml

To mount a local folder, add a bind mount under the openclaw service’s volumes section:

services:
  openclaw:
    volumes:
      - openclaw-config:/root/.openclaw
      - pinchy-workspaces:/root/.openclaw/workspaces
      - openclaw-extensions:/root/.openclaw/extensions
      - pinchy-data:/data
      - pinchy-pdf-cache:/var/cache/pinchy-files
      # Add your data directories here:
      - /path/on/host/hr-policies:/data/hr-policies:ro
      - /path/on/host/engineering-docs:/data/engineering-docs:ro

The :ro suffix mounts the directory as read-only, which is recommended since agents only need to read files.

After updating docker-compose.yml, restart the OpenClaw container:

docker compose up -d --no-deps openclaw

Examples

Local folder

Mount a folder from your host machine:

volumes:
  - /home/admin/company-docs:/data/company-docs:ro

NAS or network drive

If your NAS is mounted on the host at /mnt/nas/shared, mount a subdirectory:

volumes:
  - /mnt/nas/shared/legal:/data/legal:ro
  - /mnt/nas/shared/finance:/data/finance:ro

Multiple directories

You can mount as many directories as you need:

volumes:
  - /srv/docs/hr:/data/hr:ro
  - /srv/docs/engineering:/data/engineering:ro
  - /srv/docs/compliance:/data/compliance:ro

Each mounted directory appears as a separate selectable option in the Permissions tab when configuring an agent.

How directories appear in the UI

When you configure an agent’s permissions in the Permissions tab of Agent Settings, Pinchy scans /data/ for subdirectories and displays them as selectable options. Each mounted directory shows up by name — for example, /data/hr-policies appears as “hr-policies”.

Only top-level subdirectories of /data/ are listed. Nested directories within those are accessible to the agent but are not listed separately in the directory picker.

Verifying your mounts

To check that your directories are correctly mounted, you can exec into the running container:

docker compose exec openclaw ls /data/

You should see your mounted directories listed.

Supported file types

Knowledge Base agents can read text files, Markdown, and PDF documents — including scanned PDFs, which are analyzed using the configured model’s vision capabilities. See Create a Knowledge Base Agent — PDF support for details.

Knowledge Base vs. workspace files

Directories mounted under /data/ are admin-curated and read-only for agents — they hold your organization’s reference documents and are not writable by agents under any configuration.

This is intentional: it keeps your authoritative documents separate from anything an agent might generate or derive. An agent that has the Write files permission saves results to its own uploads/ workspace, not to /data/. See Agent Permissions for details on the workspace write capability.