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Openclaw Guardian

DevOps & Security
openclaw-guardian

Openclaw Guardian is an Agent Skill for devops & security published in the LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

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.

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How to use this skill

Bring this guide into your coding agent with a prompt tailored to the tool you use.

  1. Open your project in Codex.
  2. Copy and paste the prompt below.
  3. Review files and risks before approving any action.
Prompt to paste
Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills/blob/HEAD/skills/openclaw-guardian/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/openclaw-guardian, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

Copying this prompt does not install or run the skill. Review third-party files before use.

OpenClaw Guardian

Guardian is a standalone bash watchdog that keeps OpenClaw Gateway alive 24/7.

Repair ladder:

  1. Detect Gateway down (every 30s)
  2. Run openclaw doctor --fix (up to 3 attempts)
  3. If still down → git reset --hard to last stable commit, restart Gateway
  4. If all fails → cooldown 300s, resume monitoring
  5. Daily automatic git snapshot of workspace

Setup Steps

1. Initialize git (required for rollback)

cd ~/.openclaw/workspace
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
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.sh

3. 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 logs

Configuration

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