Self-hosting OpenClaw

Course Material & Reference Guide

Requirements

Minimum specs: 2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 2 GB storage. Ubuntu 24.04 is recommended.

Ideal for Self-Hosting:If you need a reliable VPS provider, I recommend taking a look at Cherry Servers.

Step 1 — Create a dedicated user

Avoid running everything as root. Create a dedicated openclaw user with sudo privileges and switch into it:

terminal

adduser openclaw --gecos "" && usermod -aG sudo openclaw && su - openclaw

Step 2 — Run the installer

Install OpenClaw using the one-liner below and enter the new user password when prompted:

terminal

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

Step 3 — Onboarding wizard

During onboarding, select QuickStart, then choose your AI provider (e.g. Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic), enter your API key, pick a default model, and select a messaging channel (WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, etc.).

If you ever need to re-run setup: openclaw onboard (your saved data/"brain" won't be lost).

Step 4 — Useful commands

Some handy management commands once running:

terminal

pnpm openclaw gateway status     # Check gateway
pnpm openclaw gateway restart    # Restart gateway
pnpm openclaw logs                # View logs
pnpm openclaw doctor              # Health check
pnpm openclaw models list         # List available models

Optional — Performance tuning (low-power/ARM VMs)

If CLI commands feel slow on low-power or ARM hosts, enable Node's module compile cache by adding this to ~/.bashrc:

.bashrc

export NODE_COMPILE_CACHE=/var/tmp/openclaw-compile-cache
mkdir -p /var/tmp/openclaw-compile-cache
export OPENCLAW_NO_RESPAWN=1

Security tips

A few best practices: apply least-privilege principles, use short-lived API keys and rotate them regularly, be cautious with openclaw skills install as it's a potential prompt injection vector, and enable automatic Ubuntu security updates with unattended-upgrades.

Supported messaging channels

Telegram (easiest — just register a bot with @BotFather), WhatsApp, Discord, Slack (Socket Mode), Google Chat, Signal, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, and Nostr are all supported.