auto-updater

What This Skill Does

The auto-updater skill serves as the primary maintenance engine for your Clawdbot environment. By orchestrating daily background tasks, it ensures that your system remains resilient, secure, and equipped with the latest features without requiring constant manual intervention. It systematically triggers updates for the core Clawdbot framework and iterates through every installed skill via the ClawdHub registry.

Beyond simply applying patches, the skill provides a detailed, human-readable summary of version changes. By comparing previous states to the newly updated versions, the skill notifies you of exact version jumps—such as documenting that 'browser' moved from 1.2.0 to 1.2.1. This transparency helps users track dependencies and understand when new capabilities (or breaking changes) have been introduced to their agent's toolkit.

Installation

The most straightforward way to install and activate this skill is to use the natural language prompt: 'Set up daily auto-updates for yourself and all your skills.' This instruction triggers the internal setup wizard that configures the cron job. Alternatively, advanced users can manually define the cron job through the CLI. Use the command clawdbot cron add --name "Daily Auto-Update" --cron "0 4 * * *" --tz "America/Los_Angeles" --wake now --deliver --message "Run daily auto-updates...". Once added, ensure that your Gateway is set to run in a persistent state so the cron job can trigger during the scheduled 4:00 AM window.

Use Cases

1. Automated Maintenance: Ideal for users managing multiple skills who do not want to manually check for updates via the CLI daily.
2. Security Patching: Ensures that security-focused skills (like those involving file system access) receive the latest vulnerability fixes immediately.
3. Consistency: Teams using Clawdbot across different installations can synchronize their versioning by relying on the auto-updater to keep all agent nodes on the same software release cycle.
4. Diagnostic Monitoring: By checking for updates daily, the system naturally identifies potential installation issues early if an update fails, allowing the user to address path permissions or configuration errors before they impact critical workflows.

Example Prompts

1. 'Hey Clawdbot, please set up daily auto-updates for yourself and all my currently installed skills.'
2. 'Show me the last report from the auto-updater to see if any new versions were installed overnight.'
3. 'Can you check for any pending skill updates right now without applying them yet? I want to see what is waiting.'

Tips & Limitations

• Dry-Run Mode: Before fully committing to automated updates, run clawdhub update --all --dry-run to preview the potential impact.
• Permissions: Ensure the user running the Clawdbot process has sufficient filesystem write permissions for the skill directories, or the update script will fail silently.
• Gateway Requirements: Remember that the auto-updater will not run if the Clawdbot Gateway is offline. If you frequently put your machine to sleep, consider updating at a time when the device is typically active.
• Health Checks: Always review your logs after an update; while the skill is robust, manual intervention via clawdbot doctor may occasionally be needed to handle major migrations or database schema changes.