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openclaw onboard

Guided setup that establishes inference first: it detects existing AI access, requires a live completion, persists only the working route, and then starts OpenClaw to configure the rest. openclaw setup reaches this flow on fresh systems or whenever an onboarding option is present; configured systems use bare openclaw setup for system-agent chat. openclaw setup --baseline only writes the baseline config/workspace.

CLI onboarding hub

Walkthrough of the interactive CLI flow.

Onboarding overview

How OpenClaw onboarding fits together.

CLI setup reference

Outputs, internals, and per-step behavior.

CLI automation

Non-interactive flags and scripted setups.

macOS app onboarding

Onboarding flow for the macOS menu bar app.

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Examples

  • --classic: opens the full step-by-step wizard. It cannot be combined with --non-interactive; omit --classic for automated setup.
  • --flow quickstart: opens the classic wizard with minimal prompts and auto-generates a gateway token.
  • --flow manual (alias advanced): opens the classic wizard with full prompts for port, bind, and auth.
  • --flow import: runs a detected migration provider (for example Hermes via --import-from hermes), previews the plan, then applies after confirmation. Import only runs against a fresh OpenClaw setup - reset config, credentials, sessions, and workspace state first if any exist. Use openclaw migrate for dry-run plans, overwrite mode, reports, and exact mappings.
  • --modern is a compatibility alias for the OpenClaw conversational setup assistant. It uses the same live-inference gate as openclaw setup and accepts only --workspace, --accept-risk, --non-interactive, and --json. Other setup flags are rejected instead of being silently ignored.

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Guided flow

Plain openclaw onboard starts the guided flow. It shows the security notice, detects AI access already available through configured models, API-key environment variables, and supported local CLIs, then tests the recommended candidate with a real completion. If that candidate fails, onboarding shows the reason and automatically tries the next usable candidate. If automatic detection is exhausted, the provider picker shows OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI (Grok), Google, and OpenRouter first. Choose More… for every other supported provider, grouped by provider; regions, plans, and auth methods then appear in a second menu. Supported browser or device sign-in and masked API-key or token methods use the same live completion path. OpenClaw persists only the verified model route and its credential after the test succeeds; a failed candidate does not replace the configured model or save the attempted credential. Choose Skip for now to exit without starting OpenClaw and rerun openclaw onboard when you are ready. Workspace and Gateway setup remain unchanged until OpenClaw starts. In guided mode, --workspace <dir> supplies OpenClaw’s proposed workspace and the isolated inference context. It is not persisted until you approve the OpenClaw setup proposal. Classic and noninteractive onboarding persist their workspace through their normal setup flow. After inference passes, guided onboarding immediately starts OpenClaw with the verified model. OpenClaw can then configure the workspace, Gateway, channels, agents, plugins, and other optional features. Inside OpenClaw, use open channel wizard for <channel> to hand channel credential collection to a masked terminal wizard. To change the model provider or its authentication, exit OpenClaw and run openclaw onboard; OpenClaw does not open the guided or classic provider flows. On a configured install, running openclaw onboard again verifies the current default model first, so the same flow acts as a verification and repair pass. If that check fails, the configured model is never replaced automatically — onboarding stops and asks how to continue. The check runs outside your workspace, so a model provided by a workspace plugin can fail here while still working in the agent. Use openclaw onboard --classic for provider-specific auth, channels, skills, remote Gateway setup, imports, or full Gateway controls. For conversational non-inference setup and repair, run openclaw setup; openclaw onboard --modern is a compatibility alias through the same inference gate. The classic wizard can optionally verify the default model with a live completion, but OpenClaw will not start until its own live inference check passes. In an interactive terminal, bare openclaw (no subcommand) routes by config state:
  • If the active config file is missing or has no authored settings (empty or metadata-only), it starts guided onboarding.
  • If the config file exists but fails validation, it starts the classic onboarding path with openclaw doctor guidance. OpenClaw needs working inference and is not used to repair this pre-inference state.
  • If the config file is valid, it opens the normal agent TUI. A reachable configured Gateway with an agent and model goes directly to that UI without onboarding or OpenClaw. On a configured install, reach OpenClaw with /openclaw inside the TUI or openclaw setup.
Plaintext ws:// is accepted for loopback, private IP literals, .local, and Tailnet *.ts.net gateway URLs. For other trusted private-DNS names, set OPENCLAW_ALLOW_INSECURE_PRIVATE_WS=1 in the onboarding process environment.

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Reset

--reset wipes state before running setup. --reset-scope controls how much: config (config only), config+creds+sessions (default when --reset is passed without a scope), or full (also resets the workspace). Workspace reset only happens with --reset-scope full.

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Locale

Interactive onboarding uses the CLI wizard locale for fixed setup copy. Resolve order:
  1. OPENCLAW_LOCALE
  2. LC_ALL
  3. LC_MESSAGES
  4. LANG
  5. English fallback
Supported wizard locales are en, zh-CN, and zh-TW. Locale values may use underscore or POSIX suffix forms such as zh_CN.UTF-8. Product names, command names, config keys, URLs, provider IDs, model IDs, and plugin/channel labels remain literal.

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Non-interactive setup

--non-interactive requires --accept-risk (acknowledges that agents are powerful and full system access is risky). --mode defaults to local.
--custom-api-key is optional; if omitted, onboarding checks CUSTOM_API_KEY in env. OpenClaw marks common vision model IDs (GPT-4o/4.1/5.x, Claude 3/4, Gemini, Qwen-VL, LLaVA, Pixtral, and similar) as image-capable automatically. Pass --custom-image-input for unknown custom vision IDs, or --custom-text-input to force text-only metadata. Use --custom-compatibility openai-responses for OpenAI-compatible endpoints that support /v1/responses but not /v1/chat/completions; valid values are openai (default), openai-responses, anthropic. LM Studio also has a provider-specific key flag:
Non-interactive Ollama:
--custom-base-url defaults to http://127.0.0.1:11434. --custom-model-id is optional; if omitted, onboarding uses Ollama’s suggested defaults. Cloud model IDs such as kimi-k2.5:cloud also work here. Store provider keys as refs instead of plaintext:
With --secret-input-mode ref, onboarding writes env-backed refs instead of plaintext key values: for auth-profile-backed providers this writes keyRef: { source: "env", provider: "default", id: <envVar> }; for custom providers it writes models.providers.<id>.apiKey the same way (for example { source: "env", provider: "default", id: "CUSTOM_API_KEY" }). Contract: set the provider env var in the onboarding process environment (for example OPENAI_API_KEY) and do not also pass an inline key flag unless that env var is set - a flag value without the matching env var fails fast with guidance.

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Gateway auth (non-interactive)

  • --gateway-auth token --gateway-token <token> stores a plaintext token. token is the default auth mode.
  • --gateway-auth token --gateway-token-ref-env <name> stores gateway.auth.token as an env SecretRef. Requires a non-empty env var of that name in the onboarding process environment.
  • --gateway-token and --gateway-token-ref-env are mutually exclusive.
  • With --install-daemon: a SecretRef-managed gateway.auth.token is validated but not persisted as resolved plaintext in supervisor service environment metadata; if the ref is unresolved, install fails closed with remediation guidance. If both gateway.auth.token and gateway.auth.password are configured and gateway.auth.mode is unset, install blocks until mode is set explicitly.
  • Local onboarding writes gateway.mode="local" into the config. A later config file missing gateway.mode indicates config damage or an incomplete manual edit, not a valid local-mode shortcut.
  • Local onboarding installs downloadable plugins the chosen setup path requires (for example a Codex or Copilot runtime plugin for those auth choices). Remote onboarding only writes connection info for the remote Gateway - it never installs local plugin packages.
  • --allow-unconfigured is a separate openclaw gateway run escape hatch; it does not let onboarding skip gateway.mode.

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Local gateway health

  • Unless you pass --skip-health, onboarding waits for a reachable local gateway before exiting successfully.
  • --install-daemon starts the managed gateway install path first. Without it, a local gateway must already be running (for example openclaw gateway run).
  • --skip-health skips the wait if you only want config/workspace/bootstrap writes in automation.
  • --skip-bootstrap sets agents.defaults.skipBootstrap: true and skips creating AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, TOOLS.md, IDENTITY.md, USER.md, HEARTBEAT.md, and BOOTSTRAP.md.
  • On native Windows, --install-daemon tries Scheduled Tasks first and falls back to a per-user Startup-folder login item if task creation is denied.

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Interactive ref mode

  • Choose Use secret reference when prompted, then either Environment variable or a configured secret provider (file or exec).
  • Onboarding runs a fast preflight validation before saving the ref and lets you retry on failure.

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Z.AI endpoint choices

--auth-choice zai-api-key auto-detects the best Z.AI endpoint and model for your key: Coding Plan endpoints prefer zai/glm-5.2 (falling back to glm-5.1 if unavailable); general API endpoints default to zai/glm-5.1. To force a Coding Plan endpoint, pick zai-coding-global or zai-coding-cn directly.
Mistral:

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Additional non-interactive flags

Token-based model auth (used with --auth-choice token): Cloudflare AI Gateway: --cloudflare-ai-gateway-account-id <id>, --cloudflare-ai-gateway-gateway-id <id>. Daemon install control: --no-install-daemon / --skip-daemon (aliases; skip gateway service install), --daemon-runtime <node>. Skills: --node-manager <npm|pnpm|bun> (default npm), --skip-skills. UI and hook setup: --skip-ui (skip Control UI/TUI prompts), --skip-hooks (skip webhook/hook setup), --skip-channels, --skip-search. Output: --suppress-gateway-token-output suppresses token-bearing Gateway/UI output (token hints, auto-login URL with embedded token, and automatic Control UI launch) - useful in shared terminals and CI.
--json does not imply non-interactive mode in guided or classic onboarding. With --modern, JSON is a one-shot OpenClaw overview and exits after that single result. Use --non-interactive for other scripts.

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Provider prefiltering

When an auth choice implies a preferred provider, onboarding prefilters the default-model and allowlist pickers to that provider’s models. The filter also matches other providers owned by the same plugin, which covers coding-plan variants such as volcengine/volcengine-plan and byteplus/byteplus-plan. If the preferred-provider filter yields no loaded models, onboarding falls back to the unfiltered catalog instead of leaving the picker empty.

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Web-search follow-ups

Some web-search providers trigger provider-specific follow-up prompts during onboarding:
  • Grok can offer optional x_search setup with the same xAI auth and an x_search model choice.
  • Kimi can ask for the Moonshot API region (api.moonshot.ai vs api.moonshot.cn) and the default Kimi web-search model.

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Other behaviors

  • Local onboarding DM scope behavior: CLI setup reference.
  • Fastest first chat: openclaw dashboard (Control UI, no channel setup).
  • Custom provider: connect any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint, including hosted providers not listed. Use Unknown compatibility to auto-detect via a live probe.
  • If Hermes state is detected, onboarding offers a migration flow (see --flow import above).

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Common follow-up commands

Use openclaw configure later for targeted non-inference changes and openclaw channels add for channel-only setup. For model provider or auth route changes, run openclaw onboard instead.