ping-beads

What This Skill Does

The ping-beads skill is a lightweight diagnostic utility designed specifically to monitor the health and responsiveness of the bead daemon (bd). In the OpenClaw ecosystem, the bead daemon often acts as a critical background service for task coordination and state management. By interacting directly with the Unix domain socket bd.sock, this tool confirms that the daemon is not only running but also capable of accepting incoming instructions. It serves as a vital 'heartbeat' check, ensuring that automated workflows dependent on bead processes do not fail silently due to service outages or daemon crashes.

Installation

Installation is streamlined through the ClawHub package manager. Because the bead daemon is a prerequisite dependency for your environment, no additional binary compilation or configuration is required. Simply run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/xejrax/ping-beads

Once installed, ensure the bd binary is present in your system's PATH. If bd is not found, the ping-beads command will be unable to interface with the socket, and you will need to verify your local bead installation before the skill can report back status information.

Use Cases

This skill is most effective in automated environments where reliability is paramount. Use ping-beads during pre-flight checks before executing long-running agent tasks to ensure the underlying infrastructure is ready. It is also an essential tool for troubleshooting; if an OpenClaw task hangs or reports socket-related errors, running ping-beads status provides immediate clarity on whether the daemon has become unresponsive or if there is a permission issue with the socket file itself. Developers can also incorporate this into CI/CD pipelines to verify that the environment is fully initialized.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, can you run ping-beads to see if the bead daemon is currently active?"
2. "I'm getting errors with my recent tasks. Please use ping-beads status to check if the daemon is healthy."
3. "Is the bead service running? Check the connection with ping-beads."

Tips & Limitations

The ping-beads utility is strictly a diagnostic tool; it does not attempt to restart the daemon if it is found to be offline. If the status check returns a failure, you will need to manually restart your bead daemon using systemctl or your preferred process manager. Additionally, ensure that your user account has sufficient permissions to read the bd.sock file; if your daemon runs under a different user or with restricted group access, ping-beads might report a connection failure even if the daemon is technically running. Always check system logs alongside this tool for a full picture of daemon health.