Installation Guide

Get Clawdbot up and running on your system

Requirements

Recommended Installation (Onboarding Wizard)

The preferred setup is to run the onboarding wizard. It walks through gateway, workspace, channels, and skills. The CLI wizard is the recommended path and works on macOS, Linux, and Windows (via WSL2).

Installation Command 
npm install -g clawdbot@latest
# or: pnpm add -g clawdbot@latest
clawdbot onboard --install-daemon

The wizard installs the Gateway daemon (launchd/systemd user service) so it stays running.

Quick Start (TL;DR)

Quick Start Commands 
clawdbot onboard --install-daemon
clawdbot gateway --port 18789 --verbose
# Send a message
clawdbot message send --to +1234567890 --message "Hello from Clawdbot"
# Talk to the assistant
clawdbot agent --message "Ship checklist" --thinking high

One-Liner Installation

macOS / Linux 
curl -fsSL https://clawd.bot/install.sh | bash

Works on macOS, Windows & Linux. The one-liner installs Node.js and everything else for you.

From Source (Development)

Prefer pnpm for builds from source. Bun is optional for running TypeScript directly.

Development Setup 
git clone https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot.git
cd clawdbot
pnpm install
pnpm ui:build  # auto-installs UI deps on first run
pnpm build
pnpm clawdbot onboard --install-daemon
# Dev loop (auto-reload on TS changes)
pnpm gateway:watch

Note: pnpm clawdbot ... runs TypeScript directly (via tsx). pnpm build produces dist/ for running via Node / the packaged clawdbot binary.

Docker Installation

Clawdbot supports Docker-based installations. You can run Clawdbot in a Docker container for isolated execution.

Docker installation is particularly useful for:

  • Running Clawdbot on servers or cloud instances
  • Isolated execution environments
  • Easy deployment and scaling

    • For detailed Docker setup instructions, refer to the Docker documentation in the repository.

    Development Channels

    Clawdbot offers different release channels:

  • stable: Tagged releases (vYYYY.M.D or vYYYY.M.D-<patch>), npm dist-tag latest.
  • beta: Prerelease tags (vYYYY.M.D-beta.N), npm dist-tag beta (macOS app may be missing).
  • dev: Moving head of main, npm dist-tag dev (when published).

    • Switch channels: clawdbot update --channel stable|beta|dev

    Updating

    To update Clawdbot to the latest version:

    Update Command 
    clawdbot update

    After updating, run clawdbot doctor to check for issues and verify your configuration.

    Next Steps