OpenClaw Bot Guide#

OpenClaw is a powerful personal assistant that you can run on Runabot. This guide covers common administrative tasks for your OpenClaw instance.

Initial Setup (Onboarding)#

When you first deploy an OpenClaw bot, you need to perform an initial onboarding to set up your administrator account and basic settings.

  1. Open the Web Terminal for your bot.

  2. Run the onboarding command:

    openclaw onboard

  3. Follow the interactive prompts to:

    • Set up your administrator username and password.
    • Configure basic system settings.
    • Initialize the local database.

Once onboarding is complete, you can access the OpenClaw Web UI using the credentials you just created.

Rebooting the Bot#

Since each bot runs in an isolated container managed by systemd, you can perform a full system reboot from within the terminal. This is useful if you need to apply configuration changes or restart all services.

  1. Open the Web Terminal.

  2. Execute the reboot command:

    systemctl reboot

  3. Your terminal session will disconnect.

  4. Wait about 30-60 seconds for the container to restart and services to come back online.

  5. Re-open the terminal or refresh the OpenClaw Web UI.

Rebooting the bot via systemctl reboot does not delete your data. All persistent data stored in /root (including your openclaw.json and database) is preserved across restarts.

Troubleshooting#

Viewing Service Logs#

If OpenClaw is not responding, you can check the logs of the gateway service:

journalctl -u openclaw-gateway.service -f

Restarting the Gateway Only#

If you only want to restart the OpenClaw service without rebooting the entire container:

systemctl restart openclaw-gateway.service