alphaclaw

Why AlphaClaw

• Zero to production in one deploy: Railway/Render templates ship a complete stack — no manual gateway setup.
• Self-healing: Watchdog detects crashes, enters repair mode, relaunches the gateway, and notifies you.
• Everything in the browser: No SSH, no config files to hand-edit, no CLI required after first deploy.
• Stays out of the way: AlphaClaw manages infrastructure; OpenClaw handles the AI.

No Lock-in. Eject Anytime.

AlphaClaw simply wraps OpenClaw, it's not a dependency. Remove AlphaClaw and your agent keeps running. Nothing proprietary, nothing to migrate.

Quick Start

Deploy (recommended)

Set SETUP_PASSWORD at deploy time and visit your deployment URL. The welcome wizard handles the rest.

Railway users: after deploying, upgrade to the Hobby plan and redeploy to ensure your service has at least 8 GB of RAM. The Trial plan's memory limit can cause out-of-memory crashes during normal operation.

Local / Docker

npm install @chrysb/alphaclaw
npx alphaclaw start

Or with Docker:

FROM node:22-slim
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y git curl procps cron && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
WORKDIR /app
COPY package.json ./
RUN npm install --omit=dev
ENV PATH="/app/node_modules/.bin:$PATH"
ENV ALPHACLAW_ROOT_DIR=/data
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["alphaclaw", "start"]

Setup UI

| Tab | What it manages | | ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | General | Gateway status, channel health, pending pairings, Google Workspace, repo sync schedule, OpenClaw dashboard | | Browse | File explorer for workspace visibility, inline edits, diff review, and Git-backed sync | | Usage | Token summaries, per-session and per-agent cost and token breakdown with source/agent dimension comparisons | | Cron | Cron job management, interactive rolling calendar, run-history drilldowns, trend analytics, and per-run usage breakdowns | | Nodes | Guided local-node setup for VPS deployments, per-node browser attach, reconnect commands, and routing/pairing controls | | Watchdog | Health monitoring, crash-loop status, auto-repair toggle, notifications, event log, live log tail, interactive terminal | | Providers | AI provider credentials (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, Voyage, Groq, Deepgram) and model selection | | Envars | Environment variables — view, edit, add — with gateway restart prompts | | Webhooks | Webhook endpoints, transform modules, request history, payload inspection, OAuth callbacks, Gmail watch delivery flows |

CLI

| Command | Description | | ---------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- | | alphaclaw start | Start the server (Setup UI + gateway manager) | | alphaclaw git-sync -m "message" | Commit and push the OpenClaw workspace | | alphaclaw telegram topic add --thread <id> --name <text> | Register a Telegram topic mapping | | alphaclaw version | Print version | | alphaclaw help | Show help |

Architecture

graph TD
    subgraph AlphaClaw
        UI["Setup UI<br/><small>Preact + htm + Wouter</small>"]
        WD["Watchdog<br/><small>Crash recovery · Notifications</small>"]
        WH["Webhooks<br/><small>Transforms · Request logging</small>"]
        UI --> API
        WD --> API
        WH --> API
        API["Express Server<br/><small>JSON APIs · Auth · Proxy</small>"]
    end

    API -- "proxy" --> GW["OpenClaw Gateway<br/><small>Child process · 127.0.0.1:18789</small>"]
    GW --> DATA["ALPHACLAW_ROOT_DIR<br/><small>.openclaw/ · .env · logs · SQLite</small>"]

Watchdog

The built-in watchdog monitors gateway health and recovers from failures automatically.

| Capability | Details | | ------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Health checks | Periodic openclaw health with configurable interval | | Crash detection | Listens for gateway exit events | | Crash-loop detection | Threshold-based (default: 3 crashes in 300s) | | Auto-repair | Runs `o