upgrade

What This Skill Does

The OpenClaw Safe Upgrade skill is the definitive tool for maintaining your OpenClaw installation. Designed as an atomic, process-isolated operation, it ensures that your system updates are not only seamless but inherently protected. Unlike manual update processes that can leave a system in a broken, half-installed state during a crash, this skill implements a robust cgroup escape mechanism. This ensures that even when the gateway restarts, the upgrade process continues independently of the parent agent process.

Key features include automatic pre-flight checks (disk space, dependency versioning, and breaking change analysis), full-system backups of your configuration, cron jobs, and ACPX customizations, and a critical auto-rollback mechanism. If any stage—from the npm installation to the gateway health verification—fails, the script detects the anomaly and restores your environment to its previous stable state automatically. This effectively minimizes downtime and eliminates the risk of bricking your agent.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw management utility. Run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/aliahmadaziz/openclaw-safe-upgrade

Use Cases

This skill is intended for periodic maintenance of the OpenClaw core. It is specifically built for users who need to keep their agent up-to-date with the latest features and security patches without performing dangerous manual file manipulation. It is the primary tool for responding to user requests such as "update my agent" or "check if a new OpenClaw version is available."

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please check for any pending updates and install them if available."
2. "I want to update my OpenClaw installation to the latest version."
3. "Is there an update for OpenClaw? If so, perform a safe upgrade now."

Tips & Limitations

• Pre-Flight Checks: Always run the --check flag before initiating a full upgrade. This provides a safe, read-only preview of potential conflicts.
• Session Management: Note that the agent will restart; you should inform the user before triggering the upgrade.
• Do Not Pipe: Never pipe the command output (e.g., | grep), as the script writes to /tmp/upgrade-live.log to survive restarts.
• Scope: Use this only for the OpenClaw core. Configuration patches and individual skill updates should be handled through gateway config.patch and clawhub respectively.