Openclaw diagnose

Skill soulmachine/skills/openclaw-diagnose

Skills shared by soulmachine for improving daily work efficiency with AI Agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.)

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npx -y skills add soulmachine/skills --skill openclaw-diagnose

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Diagnose and fix OpenClaw gateway and node host issues. Use when openclaw services have warnings, connection failures, pairing errors, or port conflicts.

SKILL.md

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OpenClaw Diagnose

When the user asks you to diagnose or fix OpenClaw gateway/node issues, follow this structured investigation.

Step 1: Gather status

Run these in parallel:

openclaw gateway status
openclaw node status
openclaw nodes status
openclaw nodes pending

Step 2: Analyze warnings

Look for these common issues:

Multiple gateway-like services detected

Check if both ai.openclaw.gateway and ai.openclaw.node are registered as LaunchAgents
Use launchctl print gui/$(id -u)/<label> to inspect each service
Use lsof -iTCP:<port> -sTCP:LISTEN -P to confirm which process owns the port
The gateway listens on the port; the node host connects to the gateway on that port — they do NOT conflict

Pairing required errors

Check ~/.openclaw/logs/node.err.log for pairing required or ECONNREFUSED
If the node shows "pairing required", run openclaw nodes pending to find the pending request
Approve with: openclaw nodes approve <requestId>
Pairing requests expire quickly — if approval fails with "unknown requestId", restart the node (openclaw node restart) and immediately re-check pending + approve

ECONNREFUSED errors

The gateway may not be running yet when the node starts
Check if gateway is listening: lsof -iTCP:<port> -sTCP:LISTEN -P
If gateway is down: openclaw gateway restart
The node has KeepAlive: true so it will automatically reconnect once the gateway is up

Step 3: Verify fix

After taking corrective action, confirm health:

openclaw nodes status    # Should show: paired · connected
openclaw nodes pending   # Should show: No pending pairing requests
tail -5 ~/.openclaw/logs/node.err.log  # Check for new errors

Key architecture notes

Gateway (ai.openclaw.gateway): WebSocket server that listens on a port (default 18789)
Node host (ai.openclaw.node): Client that connects to the gateway via WebSocket to register capabilities (browser, system commands)
The --host and --port flags on openclaw node run specify the gateway address to connect to, not a port to bind
One gateway supports multiple nodes — running both on the same machine is the normal setup
Node plist is at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.openclaw.node.plist
Gateway plist is at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.openclaw.gateway.plist
Node logs: ~/.openclaw/logs/node.log and ~/.openclaw/logs/node.err.log