- name
- openclaw-guardian
- description
- Deploy and manage a Guardian watchdog process for OpenClaw Gateway. Provides automated health monitoring, self-repair via
doctor --fix, git-based workspace rollback, daily snapshots, and optional Discord alerting. Use when a user wants to harden their OpenClaw instance against crashes, config corruption, or bad workspace edits — or when setting up Guardian for the first time on a new server/container.
OpenClaw Guardian
Guardian is a standalone bash watchdog that keeps OpenClaw Gateway alive 24/7.
Repair ladder:
- Detect Gateway down (every 30s)
- Run
openclaw doctor --fix(up to 3 attempts) - If still down →
git reset --hardto last stable commit, restart Gateway - If all fails → cooldown 300s, resume monitoring
- Daily automatic git snapshot of workspace
Setup Steps
1. Initialize git (required for rollback)
cd ~/.openclaw/workspace
git config --global user.email "guardian@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Guardian"
git init && git add -A && git commit -m "initial"Skip if repo already exists. Without git, doctor --fix still works; rollback is skipped.
2. Install guardian.sh
Copy scripts/guardian.sh from this skill to ~/.openclaw/guardian.sh:
cp scripts/guardian.sh ~/.openclaw/guardian.sh
chmod +x ~/.openclaw/guardian.sh3. Start Guardian
Container / no systemd (nohup):
nohup ~/.openclaw/guardian.sh >> /tmp/openclaw-guardian.log 2>&1 &Linux VPS with systemd: See references/setup.md → Pattern B.
4. Auto-start on container restart
Add to ~/.openclaw/start-gateway.sh (before the final exec line):
pkill -f "guardian.sh" 2>/dev/null || true
nohup /home/ubuntu/.openclaw/guardian.sh >> /tmp/openclaw-guardian.log 2>&1 &5. Optional: Discord alerts
export DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="https://discord.com/api/webhooks/..."Or add to start-gateway.sh as a persistent export.
Verify
pgrep -a -f "guardian.sh" # confirm process running
tail -f /tmp/openclaw-guardian.log # watch live logsConfiguration
All settings via environment variables. Defaults work out of the box. See references/setup.md for full variable reference, systemd config, and architecture diagram.
Notes
- Guardian coexists with
gw-watchdog.sh— run both for layered resilience - Rollback targets the 2nd-newest non-auto commit (skips daily-backup, rollback, auto-backup commits)
- Log path:
/tmp/openclaw-guardian.log