OpenClaw Debugger

Diagnose a broken OpenClaw agent (Orion, Echo, Radar, or any custom agent from awesome-openclaw-agents). Produces a structured diagnosis report identifying the most likely root cause.

Compatible with OpenClaw 2026.4.11 and later. For deeper reference see TROUBLESHOOTING.md in this repo.

When to use

• Agent returns empty output or times out
• openclaw agent --agent <name> --message "..." hangs
• Heartbeat dashboard shows the agent as stale
• Model provider errors (429, 401, connection refused)
• User says "openclaw is broken" / "agent is down" / "why is Orion not replying"

Instructions

Work through the checklist in order. Stop at the first failing step and report it — no need to run later steps until that's fixed.

1. Gateway health

openclaw agent --status

• If the gateway is down, tell the user to run openclaw gateway restart.
• If it reports "port 18789 in use by another process", find and kill the stale process (lsof -i :18789).

2. Tail recent logs

tail -n 200 ~/.openclaw/logs/gateway.log
tail -n 200 ~/.openclaw/agents/<name>/logs/agent.log

Grep for ERROR, PANIC, 401, 429, timeout. The first error in the tail is usually the real cause — everything after is fallout.

3. Heartbeat status

cat ~/.openclaw/agents/<name>/heartbeat.json

• Check last_seen timestamp. More than 5 minutes old = worker crashed.
• If status is starting for more than 60s, the agent is stuck in init (usually a bad SOUL.md or missing env var).

4. Session file integrity

ls -la ~/.openclaw/agents/<name>/sessions/sessions.json

• If the file is >5 MB, sessions may be corrupt. Back it up and delete:

  mv ~/.openclaw/agents/<name>/sessions/sessions.json{,.bak}

• If the JSON is invalid (python3 -m json.tool < sessions.json), same fix.

5. Model provider reachability

Read ~/.openclaw/agents/<name>/SOUL.md frontmatter to find the configured model and provider. Then:

• Anthropic (Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6): echo $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | head -c 10 — confirm key exists.
• GLM-5.1 / Minimax M2.7: check ~/.openclaw/providers.json for the base URL and hit /v1/models with curl.
• Gemma 4 local: confirm Ollama or the local runtime is up (curl localhost:11434/api/tags).

A 401 means bad key. A 429 means you're rate limited — retry with exponential backoff or switch model. Connection refused on localhost means the local runtime crashed.

6. SOUL.md validity

Read the agent's SOUL.md and check:

• YAML frontmatter parses (must have name, model, system_prompt fields)
• model string matches one in ~/.openclaw/providers.json
• No lingering Turkish prompts if the agent is supposed to respond in English (per repo rules)

Output format

Print a diagnosis report like this:

OpenClaw Debugger — <agent-name>

[OK]     Gateway up (port 18789)
[OK]     Logs clean
[FAIL]   Heartbeat stale (last_seen 14 min ago)
[SKIP]   Session file
[SKIP]   Model provider
[SKIP]   SOUL.md

Root cause: worker process crashed ~14 min ago. Last log line:
  ERROR 2026-04-13T08:41:02 panic: model provider returned 401

Fix:
  1. Export a fresh ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
  2. openclaw gateway restart
  3. openclaw agent --agent <name> --message "ping"

Keep it terse. The user wants a fix, not an essay.

Example invocations

• /openclaw-debugger orion
• "My Echo agent is stuck — debug it"
• "Why is openclaw agent --agent radar timing out?"