OpenClaw Installation Tips: Skip Onboarding and Use Diagnostic Commands

An OpenClaw user on Reddit shares specific installation troubleshooting advice based on repeated setup experience, particularly on headless VPS environments like Contabo.

Key Installation Recommendations

The source provides these concrete steps:

• Start with skip onboarding installation - most issues occur during the onboarding process, especially when installing on VPS
• After setup, first set up proper approvals before configuring any channels
• Read the output of openclaw doctor and openclaw status commands to understand system state
• Use these diagnostic outputs to guide LLMs to fix issues (LLMs sometimes focus on wrong problems or claim everything is fine when it's not)

Practical Example

The user notes: "Having only messaging allowed is ok for LLM but you would want more things to be done from different channels, reading the openclaw status and openclaw doctor helps." This suggests that default configurations might be insufficient for production use, and the diagnostic commands reveal what capabilities are actually enabled versus what you need.

The advice comes from hands-on experience: "This is coming from my experience in installing it repeatedly and running into issues. My setup is on headless VPS on Contabo."