session-guard

What This Skill Does

Session Guard is a robust infrastructure management tool for OpenClaw that solves the critical architectural flaw where internal heartbeat processes pollute the main conversation session. By disabling the default heartbeat, Session Guard prevents rapid file bloat, session corruption, and silent context resets. It offloads heartbeat tasks to an isolated, lightweight process, monitors session health via cron-based watchdogs, and automatically hydrates the session if a reset is detected. This ensures that your agent's core memory remains pristine and focused, preventing the system from wiping away days of progress due to log saturation.

Installation

The recommended way to deploy Session Guard is via the One-Shot installer, which configures the system in a single step: python3 skills/session-guard/scripts/install.py. This script is fully idempotent and will auto-detect your existing OpenClaw configuration. For granular control, you can use flags like --dry-run to preview changes or --crit-mb to customize your session size limits. Alternatively, install directly from the repository using clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/bowen31337/session-guard. Always run python3 skills/session-guard/scripts/audit.py post-installation to verify that the configurations are correctly applied and that no lingering heartbeat processes are active in the main thread.

Use Cases

• Preventing Context Loss: Critical for long-running agents that suffer from silent session wipes after 2-3 days of uptime.
• Optimizing Memory Management: Ideal for agents with complex instructions that are susceptible to truncation when the session file exceeds 10MB.
• Silent Monitoring: Useful when you need to maintain heartbeat pulses (alerting) without cluttering the primary conversation logs with redundant status checks.
• Automated Recovery: Ensures the agent resumes functionality immediately if an underlying system error triggers a session restart.

Example Prompts

1. "Run the Session Guard audit to check if my session file size is approaching the corruption threshold."
2. "Install Session Guard with a 4MB critical threshold and use the qwen2.5-7b model for the monitor cron."
3. "My context keeps disappearing every night; please configure Session Guard to monitor and rehydrate my session automatically."

Tips & Limitations

• Model Selection: Always use lighter, cheaper models (like proxies or 7B-class models) for heartbeat and monitor crons to keep overhead low. Avoid using large, expensive models for routine maintenance checks.
• Compatibility: Ensure your gateway URL and token are correctly defined in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json before running the installer.
• Disclaimer: While Session Guard handles heartbeat isolation, it cannot fix external API errors caused by empty string forwarding; however, it removes the primary cause of these errors by offloading the task.