OpenClaw: Simple VPS Setup Guide

What is going on, guys? Welcome back. In this video, today, we're going to set up Open Claw on a VPS, so virtual private server. We're going to keep it very simple. We're going to focus on speed and simplicity. The only thing we're going to do is we're going to set it up. We're going to connect it to Telegram, and we're going to see how to work with this assistant on a virtual private server, on a VPS, online. So, keep in mind, this is not going to be a full crash course exploring all the different features. If you're interested in that, let me know in the comment section down below. This is just a very simple setup guide. Now, if you like this video, let me know by hitting a like button and subscribing. But, now, let us get right into it. — All right. So, we're going to set up Open Claw in this video today. For those of you guys who have been living under a rock, Open Claw is basically this AI agent that controls your entire system. So, think of it to be a little bit like Claude Code, but it can do more than just edit files and run commands. It can read your emails. It can communicate with you via Telegram, WhatsApp, and different messengers. It has skills, as well. It basically controls your entire system. That can be a Docker container. virtual machine. It can be your desktop PC, if you're not very intelligent. Or, it can be a VPS, a virtual private server, which is what we're going to do in this video today. Now, since no company contacted me to sponsor this video, I'm just going to go with my default, which is Hetzner. So, they're not sponsoring this video, but this is usually where I run my servers. And here, I'm going to set up an Open Claw machine. Now, it doesn't really matter what kind of provider you use. You can self-host. You can run a VM. You can use Hetzner. You can use any other competitor that you want. The setup process is going to be a little bit different, depending on the provider that you use. So, I don't want to focus too much on the setup that is specific to Hetzner in this case. The only thing you need to have is some server, preferably Ubuntu, so you can run the exact same commands as me. But, just some server, some IP address, and some way to connect to it. So, in my case, I'm going to go to Hetzner. I have already a server here. So, I can go to servers. You can see I have this Open Claw server with an IP address and everything. What I'm going to do is I'm going to rebuild it, which means I'm going to choose Ubuntu as an image here. And by clicking rebuild and typing the name, I'm basically resetting the server to a clean install of Ubuntu. Nothing set up at all. This is basically starting from scratch. So, again, whatever provider you're using, whether you're using a VM or whatever, install Ubuntu, and then just log into your system. That can be done via a private public key pair, or by just using a password. So, in my case, now, the rebuild finished. I'm going to open up a terminal, and I have a config file with the server and everything being set up. I'm not going to focus too much on that. What you want to do is you just want to connect in whatever way, SSH, root@IPaddress, or whatever. I have configured it here to be just with a public and private key pair, and I connect to Open Claw, which is just the name that I gave my server. So, once you are in the server, the real fun begins. So, this is where the process is going to be the same. Just get onto an Ubuntu server, and then you can follow these instructions here. Now, the first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to run sudo apt update, just to make sure that we have everything up to date. We're going to also run upgrade, to get the latest package versions here. So, update is finished. sudo apt upgrade. 130 megabytes of additional space will be used. There you go. Now, the packages are updated. And what we need to do next is we need to get something called the Node Version Manager, because Node. js has to have a certain version for Open Claw to work. The minimum is, I think, 22, but recommended is 24. And this is not the version that we get from the Ubuntu repositories. So, you can just go to Google and type NVM GitHub, and go to the Node Version Manager. And there, you're going to see how to install it. It's basically just a simple curl command. So, down here, you can just copy and paste this curl command from the installation guide. That is going to get NVM onto your system. Now, to initialize it, you also need to source the bashrc. So, just run source. bashrc in the user directory. And now, you should be able to use NVM. What we're going to do with this is we're going to say NVM install 24, to install Node version 24. And we're also going to use it. So, I'm going to say, once this is done, NVM use 24, as well. And these are basically all the prerequisites for Open Claw. Now, we can just go ahead and say npm install -g for global Open Claw, and then @latest. So, we can run this, and this will now install it onto the VPS directly. You can also install it in a Docker container, if you want to. The only thing that I would recommend is don't install it on a machine that has access to your emails, bank accounts, and everything, because Open Claw is not safe. It can do a lot of stuff that you maybe don't want it to do. It is not considered a very secure piece of software, especially if you just give it access to everything, because this thing controls your entire system, basically. It can delete stuff. It can read stuff. It can create stuff. It can send messages. The moment you give it access to something, it can basically do whatever it wants. So, either keep it in an isolated environment, container, or virtual machine, or on a VPS, where you don't

have access to any sensitive information. So, now, Open Claw is installed. Let's clear the screen, and then we're going to run Open Claw onboard, which is basically like an installation setup thing. And we're going to say dash install dash daemon. This starts the process. Here, you can see, again, the warning that Open Claw is not secure, that we should run Open Claw Security Audit on a regular basis, and that we're understanding the risk, and that Open Claw is not safe. We can just say yes. Then, we choose the quick start setup mode, to keep things simple. And what we need is we need two things. One is the model provider. So, you can either use Anthropic, Gemini. You can use Deep Seek. You can use Open AI, whatever. And you also want to have a communication channel. So, you can connect to the bot and talk to it via WhatsApp. You can do that via Telegram. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go with Open AI, and I'm also Telegram. So, the Open AI API key is what's going to power the intelligence of our Open Claw agent here. It's going to have GPT 5. 5 running. That is going to be the brain of our model. But, then, of course, it has other components, like Identity. md, Soul. md, that give it personality and guidance. But, the intelligence, the brain, is going to be Open AI GPT 5. 5. So, I'm going to press enter, and now it asks me for the Open AI API key. Make sure you have one. Copy it, and then paste it here. I already have mine here in the clipboard. So, just paste it. Now, we're connected to the Open AI API, and we can use GPT 5. 5. I can keep this, or I can also choose a different model, if I want to. And the next thing here is to set up the communication channel. So, Telegram is a very simple one. You can also go with Slack. You can go with WhatsApp. But, Telegram is very, very straightforward. All you have to do is you have to just talk to the Bot Father, which is a bot that allows you to create bots. You have to create a bot, and then you get a token. You paste that token into Open Claw, and then you can communicate with it. There is also some pairing that we need to do, but that's also quite straightforward. So, what we're going to do is we're going to go with Telegram, and it's going to ask us for the token. Now, to get this token, what you need to do is, as I mentioned, you need to contact the Bot Father. So, you can just look for it. You can search for it, and then you talk to it. Here, you can see I already played around with some bots. All you have to do is you have to start a chat with it, and you have to say /new bot. So, /new bot is going to start the process. Then, you can give the bot a name. This name can be whatever you want. For example, Neural Claw could be the name of the bot. And then, you need also a unique username. So, this is something that should not be taken, and most names are already taken. So, I think Neural Claw is probably also taken, or Neural Claw bot is also going to be taken. So, usually, you have to come up with something fancy. Let's say Neural9TutorialClawBot. This one should not be taken, hopefully. And it's not. So, now, the bot is created, and we get this token. I can just click on this token here, copy to clipboard, now. And then, I can enter it into the onboarding process. So, I just enter it, press enter again, and that now connects to Telegram. It also asks for a search provider. We can go with DuckDuckGo. It doesn't require an API key, so that's fine. We can also configure skills, if we want to. In my case, here, I'm going to keep it simple, and just add the summarization skill. Nothing fancy. It shows the Homebrew install command, if we want that. And then, it asks for a couple of API keys that we can set up, if we want to. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to say no, no, to all of these. And I'm also going to skip the setup of the hooks, for now. So, we're really going for minimal setup, and then you can take it from there, and expand, and look at all the different things that you can do. But, I want to show you how to quickly get to a working version. All right. And then, we get to the final part, which is how do you want to hatch your bot? You can hatch it in the terminal. You can open the web UI. Or, you can do it later. I like to do it in the terminal, so we can just go with the default version here. And hatching, basically, means waking it up. It will tell the bot, "Wake up, my friend. " And then, it's going to ask you, "Okay, what's your name? What's my name? Who am I? Who are you? " And you can just talk to the bot, and give it some basic instructions. This is going to fill up the bot's Identity. md, and Soul. md, and everything. And then, you can basically just cancel, or control C out of it. It's going to finish the process, and the onboarding is done. There you go. I got an answer. "Hey, I just came online. Who am I, and who are you? We can figure out the basics together. My name, what kind of creature I am, the vibe you want from me, and so on, and so forth. " So, I'm going to say, "I am Florian. You are Neural Claw. You are professional, concise, dry, and straight to the point. " Because I don't like neural networks, or I don't like agents that ramble forever. I want to have concise, straightforward answers, and not jokes, and emojis, and everything. Then, you can see, I've written the basics down. Git needs a local author identity before I can

commit. So, I'm setting the workspace local one for Neural Claws committing only the profile files. Done. I saved you, Florian, me, Neural Claws professional concise. Perfect. Next, what matters for how I behave, hard boundaries or anything. I'm going to say just don't ramble too much. Also, ask for permission. Just some very basic instructions, of course. Of course, you should um take the time to set this up properly. I'm just showing you how to get this done quickly, but if you have any hard boundaries, things that you never wanted to happen, you should also communicate it here. All right, noted and saved and basically just confirmed that is it. So, now what we can do is we can say control C twice to exit this. And now it's going to tell us, "Okay, um a bunch of messages and in the end it will say onboarding complete. " And that's when you know that you're basically done. There you go. It says "Onboarding complete. Use the dashboard link above to control Open Claws. " Now, I'm not sure what the dashboard link is because I don't see one, but here you can also say control C now uh twice or maybe three times until you get out of this. There you go. And now we can take a look at the token because we do need the token to log into the web interface because Open Claws has a web interface that we can use to chat with the bot but also to configure stuff. And to get it, this gateway, to get into this web gateway, first of all, we can see if it's up. We can say open claw gateway status. And in this case now, it shows us that it's running. So, everything's fine. You can also see it's running on localhost port 18789. That's fine, but we still need a token to connect with. So, I'm going to go to I'm going to cat, so I'm going to just read. openclaw and then openclaw. json. And up here, there is a token gateway off token. This is the thing that you're looking for. Copy this. You're going to need it. And now what we want to do, of course, is we want to connect to the web interface but from our local machine, from my laptop that I'm working on here. So, for this we need something called an SSH tunnel. We need to basically connect the ports or map the ports. So, we're going to do that by saying SSH -n -l. And by the way, if you don't want to remember this command, you can also just run the open claw dashboard and it's going to tell you that this command exists. So, basically tells you here SSH n l and then the port number 18789 mapping to 127. 0. 0. 1, which is localhost 18789. And now what you need to put after that is how you connected to your server. So, something like root@ipaddress or maybe uh whatever you used. In my case, I'm going to use open claws since this is the name I have in my SSH config. This is how I connected. And by doing that now, we have a tunnel. So, if I open this localhost URL in my browser, which happens on my second screen, of course, so let me move that here. This opens the open claw gateway dashboard. And what we need to do here now is we need to put the token here. So, I'm going to paste the token that I copied from the JSON file. I'm going to connect. And there you go. We're now in the open claw control panel. All right. And the first thing I want to do is I want to see if Telegram works. So, I'm going to go to channels and I'm going to take a look at Telegram. You can see here that it is running and we have a last start. And what we can do now to check if this is true is we can go back to our Telegram. This can be done on the phone. Telegram web. And we can click on this link here, which is the Neural 9 tutorial claw bot. So, by clicking on this, I'm connected to the bot. I can start a conversation. And by doing that, it tells me immediately that the access is not configured because there is a pairing code. I need to use that. I need to approve it in order to be able to actually communicate with the bot. So, what I do is I copy this command here, the open claw pairing command. And I go back into the CLI and I just copy paste this. Run this. Approve the Telegram code. And by doing that, this is going to allow me to communicate with this bot. So, I can say now, "Hi. " And it took some time, but now you can see it's typing, which means that our bot now responds to the message. And it took some time and we got "Hi, Florian. " And it only took some time because my server is lagging, so that's not an open claw uh problem. But basically, I can now communicate with it. I can say create uh shopping list. md file and keep track of the items I need to buy. And I can say put I don't know, shampoo on there. Now, it creates a shopping list and it will always be able to edit this and do whatever I want to do there. The cool thing is now, and I can also showcase that because I have Telegram on my phone, I will go now into my phone. You cannot see that, but I go into Telegram. I go into the conversation with Neural Claw. I'm just going to speak to it with a

voice memo. I'm going to tell it to do something. Uh let me just think about it. Let's say "Please put water and bananas onto the shopping list. " So, this is now a voice memo. You can also see it here now in the web interface that I sent a voice memo. It's going to take that, parse it using OpenAI's API, and it will be able to act on this. You can see it reads the shopping list. It will put the items onto the shopping list. And there you go. Added water and bananas. And this is basically the minimal setup I wanted to show you because, of course, you can now start and play with this endlessly. You can connect emails. You can connect calendars. You can do so many things. You can automate all sorts of different processes. But essentially, this thing has control over the VPS. It owns an entire server. It owns an Ubuntu system. It can install packages. It can remove packages. It can uh change the system config. It can connect to stuff. It only needs credentials at the end of the day. And of course, there's many mechanisms that you can configure. You can also configure it to be able to respond to you uh without you telling it to. So, you can enable certain skills that allow the agent to respond to you in 5 minutes. So, you tell it, "Hey, please remind me in 5 minutes to do XYZ. " And then it can do that. It can proactively just ping you and tell you, "Hey, you wanted me to remind you in 5 minutes of XYZ. " But this is the basic setup I wanted to show you. I wanted to show it primarily because it's often times not straightforward on how to install Open Claws. There's some small things that can always uh be a little bit difficult on the way even though the process in general is quite trivial. But sometimes, you know, the node version doesn't work or this part of the setup doesn't work. I don't know where to find the token. So, I hope this was an easy guide that showed you how to install Open Claws with OpenAI and Telegram. So, that's it for this video today. I hope you enjoyed it and hope you learned something. If so, let me know by hitting the like button and leaving a comment in the comment section down below. Also, if you want to see a more in-depth crash course on Open Claws exploring different features or maybe project videos where I show you interesting use cases for Open Claws, let me know in the comment section down below. Also, in case you're interested, on my website you will find a services tab and a tutoring tab. There you can contact me if you need help with a project, if you need a freelancer or consultant, whatever. You can contact me there via email or LinkedIn by clicking on the buttons at the bottom of the page. And besides that, don't forget to subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell to not miss a single future video for free. Other than that, thank you for watching. See you in the next video and bye.