Openclaw diagnose

Skill soulmachine/skills/openclaw-diagnose

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

Install

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

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

2 things to look at

3 stars3 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
runs commandsInstructs the agent to run 8 commands, including `openclaw gateway status` and 7 more.

SKILL.md

2.6 KB, 630 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

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

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.