MegaClaw: Containerized OpenClaw Setup with Playwright and Homebrew

MegaClaw is a containerized implementation of OpenClaw designed to solve persistent setup problems. The author built it after repeatedly encountering issues when deploying OpenClaw on new machines, specifically around reproducibility, permission errors, and lack of Playwright and Homebrew support.

Architecture and Components

The system uses a two-image Podman setup:

• megaclaw-base: A multi-stage build image that uses Playwright and Homebrew as its base. Homebrew is copied from the official homebrew/brew image. Pre-installing Homebrew prevents mid-session failures that occur when OpenClaw attempts to install packages at runtime.
• megaclaw-runtime: Created by running task build:runtime, which executes the full interactive OpenClaw onboarding process. The configuration is then baked into the image using podman commit, eliminating bind-mount issues and UID permission problems.

Usage and Features

• Run task run to start the container at any time
• The base image is published to GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) as a multi-platform manifest supporting both amd64 and arm64 architectures
• This enables effortless execution on Raspberry Pi 5 without compilation time or Homebrew installation conflicts
• The setup has been tested and runs stable on both Raspberry Pi 5 and WSL environments

The repository is available at https://github.com/lovato/megaclaw.