Full OpenClaw Setup Tutorial: Step-by-Step Walkthrough (Clawdbot)

Hey, I'm Caleb and in this video I'll show you the best and easiest way to set up OpenClaw and build your own AI assistant. What makes OpenClaw different is simple. Tools like ChatGpt are places you go to. You open a tab, ask a question, get an answer, and you're done. But OpenClaw can actually live inside apps you already use and keep working in the background, running on a schedule, and handling tasks without you constantly checking in. I'm going to show you the easiest way to set this up step by step with no code. and we'll connect it to things like Telegram and Google Workspace so you can start building automations right away. And by the end of this video, you'll have an assistant you can text from your phone that remembers everything you tell it and runs 24/7. But first, we'll need a place to run OpenClaw. And technically, this can be any machine you own. It could be a spare laptop, a desktop PC, or even a little home server. All of that could work. But here's the catch. If you want OpenClaw to actually be useful, it needs to be online whenever you need it. because the second your computer goes to sleep, restarts, or your internet cuts out, your assistant is basically gone. So, yes, you can run this at home, but then you're dealing with keeping a machine on 24/7, port forwarding, and hoping your internet doesn't randomly break the setup. And also, think about security. When you run this on your personal computer, you're mixing an always on assistant with your everyday files and accounts. We need something that keeps OpenClaw isolated on its own machine, separate from your personal device. So, that's why we're going to keep things safe and simple by using a VPS. A VPS is basically a computer in the cloud that stays online all the time and you can access it from anywhere. That way, with this setup, OpenClaw will always be running and once you get it set up, you won't have to worry about it again. Now, there are a lot of VPS options out there, but for OpenClaw, I recommend Hostinger. It's one of the best values for this kind of setup. The KVM plans have plenty of resources to run OpenClaw reliably. And you're also getting a VPS you can use for other projects later. Plus, Hostinger makes this very beginnerfriendly with a one-click OpenClaw deploy, so you don't have to manually install everything from scratch. And to get the best available deal on Hostinger's VPS plans, make sure you sign up using the first link in the video description. That link automatically applies our exclusive discount, giving you an extra 10% off. And once you go to that link, you'll be brought to this page right here. As you can see, we're going to autodeploy with OpenClaw already installed for us, which is great. And over here on the right side, you can select your VPS plan. By default, it's going to be set to KVM2, which is going to give you plenty of resources for running OpenClaw. You'll get two virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, 100 GB of NVME disc space, and 8 TB of bandwidth. If you want to check out the other plans, you can select it up here and switch between them. But for this video, I'm just going to go with KVM2. Go down here and click on deploy. And then here on the lefth hand side, you can choose your billing period. By default, it's going to be set to 24 months. That's going to give you the biggest savings, a free domain for the first year, and two extra months of free hosting. However, you can switch it from 24 months to 12 month and 1 month plans as well. At the very least, I'd recommend going with the 12-month plan. That's still going to get you plenty of savings and also a free domain for the first year. Scrolling down, we can see that we're going to autodeploy with OpenClaw. You can choose if you want to toggle on daily auto backups. That's going to run you an extra $6 per month extra. Then go down here and confirm your server location. This should be the server location that's closest to you or your audience. It's going to suggest the best option for you based on your IP address. And for me, that's going to be the US. So, I'll leave this as default. Now, let's go up and we're going to make sure that the coupon here is applied by using the first link in the video description. This should optimize your savings and auto apply this coupon here. All right, with that done, let's click on continue to move on. On this screen here, you're going to want to register for a Hostinger account. So, go ahead and enter your email address right here and create a password. Let's go down and click on register. And then here, you just need to enter your billing address and payment information. I'm going to go ahead and fill this out real quick. Awesome. Now on this screen once you filled out everything go ahead and click on submit payment and then here click on get started. First you want to copy and save your open claw gateway token. Make sure you treat this like a password. Don't share it with anyone and if it gets exposed you'll want to regenerate and redeploy. So I'm going to copy this and I'm going to save it somewhere safe. And next you're going to see a few fields here. You have the anthropic API key, the Open AI API key, and a WhatsApp number field. If you plan on using WhatsApp, go ahead and put your phone number here, but for this video, we're really just concerned about the OpenAI and Enthropic API keys. So, you're going to find two links in the video description. The first one is going to be the OpenAI API keys, and then the other link will take you to Claude or Anthropics. And make sure billing is enabled on both of these platforms, or else this isn't going to work. It's important to note that OpenClaw itself is free, but the part that costs money here is the AI model like using OpenAI or Claude because these are usagebased, meaning you pay per request or message. So start with normal usage, keep an eye on your usage dashboard, and just remember that the more powerful models that you choose usually give better results, but they also cost more. So I'm going to start with OpenAI. I'm going to go to the top right and click on create new secret key. I'll give it a name. Just name this open claw. You can set your project and permissions. Then click on create secret key. I'm going to click on copy. Then I'll go back to Hostinger. I'm going to paste it into the OpenAI API key slot here. Again, make sure you don't share this with anybody. Now, let's do the same thing for Enthropic. If you don't want to set up both, you don't have to, but in this video, I'm going to go ahead and set up both. So that way you can switch between models anytime and depending on what you're doing, one might be cheaper or a better fit than the other. So having both gives you the flexibility to choose. So I'm going to go back up to the Enthropic API dashboard, click on get API key, and again I'm going to name this one open claw and click on create API key. I'm going to copy this here. go back to Hostinger and paste it in right here. Okay. So, once you have your API keys filled out, go down and click on deploy. Okay. And after you deploy, you're going to see this message here that says your project is being deployed. This can take a few minutes to complete. So, I'm going to fast forward to whenever it's done. Okay. And as you can see here, it's changed from created to running. This is exactly what we want to see. To open up your open claw dashboard, go down here and click on this link. And right away, you're going to see disconnected from gateway. In order to fix this, go to overview. And then on gateway token, you're going to paste in your openclaw gateway token that we copied and saved earlier. So go ahead and paste this in right here. Go down and click on connect. And on the right side, you'll see the status change to connected. Now, let's go back up to the chat here and let's type in a quick message to see if everything's working. I'll just ask if everything is working properly. I'm going to send the message and then we'll see the response come in right here. And then here we go. We can see that everything is now working properly. Okay. Now, the next thing we'll do here is set up a chatting app like Telegram. Now, if you're wanting to use WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord, you can ask your AI assistant how to do this, and it's going to walk you through the steps, but the most popular platform people use for this is Telegram. The reason for that is because you're able to easily set up bots and connect tokens. And right now, it'll show you how easy this actually is. So, go ahead and start sending a message to your assistant. I'll say, "Let's set up Telegram." Send a message. And it's going to come back and tell us the steps that we need to do next. So, it's going to tell us a bunch of stuff here, but the main thing we want to look at here is the first step, which is creating a bot with a botfather. So, if you check the description, you're going to find a Telegram link that's going to bring you to the BotFather Telegram bot. And all you want to do there is open up that link, and it's going to launch a conversation with a botfather. And when you launch that conversation, it's going to look something like this. When you're here, go ahead and type slash newbot and then send that message. And the first thing we'll need to do is give it a name. I'll just name this open claw tutorial and then 1 2 3. Press enter. Next, we need to choose a username for the bot. And when you do this, it has to end in the word bot. So, for example, open claw tutorial 123 bot. And we'll see if that's available. And there we go. We've just created a new bot. And then down here, you'll find your bot token. Again, make sure you don't share this with anybody. I'm going to go ahead and copy this token. And then back over here in my OpenClaw dashboard, I'm simply going to send this as a message. Next, it needs your chat ID. To obtain this, go ahead and go back to BotFather. And you're going to find this link right here that's going to open up a conversation with the bot you just created. So, I'm going to click on it. I'm going to go down and press start. Okay. Okay, so once you get to this step right here, you may be asked for a pairing code, but in this case, it's asking for our Telegram chat ID. I've set up a few assistants with this method, and it seems to always change. So, in this case, I'm being asked for my chat ID. If you go ahead and check in the description, you're going to find another Telegram link that's going to get you access to the user info bot. And then, whenever you launch a conversation with it, it's going to give you your Telegram user ID right here. Now, all you have to do is just copy this and then paste it in here as a message. And then whenever you send this here in OpenClaw, it's going to get everything configured for you. And there we go. As we can see, it says that Telegram is configured and the gateway is restarting and that our bot is now ready. Now, it says to open Telegram and try sending a message to the bot. So, I'm going to switch back over to my conversation here and then I'm going to say, is this thing working? I'll send a message. You know, you see the bot is typing. And let's see if it works. And there we go. It says it's working. Hey Caleb, first message through Telegram. We're officially connected. The next thing I want to ask is what model it's using. Cuz if you remember earlier, we created a key for OpenAI and Enthropic. So we want to confirm which model we're currently using. And right now we can see it's using clawed opus 4.5. And we also have GPT40 as an option. And if you ever want to change your model, just tell your AI assistant that's what you want to do. And it's going to rewrite the code on the back end to configure itself for the model that you actually want. Okay. And with Telegram setup, we're able to communicate with our AI assistant through Telegram on desktop and on our mobile devices. Next, let's talk about skills. With OpenClaw, you can install skills to expand what your assistant is able to do. And to find skills, you have two easy options. Your first option is Claw Hub. You'll find a link to this in the video description as well. Here you can publish skills and browse skills that are available. And you can also install skills through the public skills directory on GitHub. This link is also available in the video description. And here's how you install skills super easily. Scrolling through here, we have a bunch of different stuff here that we can see. But the first skill that I would start with is the Google Workspace skill. So, if I do control F on my keyboard or command F on Mac, I'm going to type in gogg. I'm going to go down to the second one here. And here you'll find a Google Workspace CLI. This will allow you to connect Gmail, calendar, drive, contacts, and sheets, which for an AI assistant will be really helpful for it to have access to. So, if I click on this skill here, and then I copy the GitHub link. From there, I can go back into Telegram and then I can write a message to my bot that says, "Install this skill." And then I'm going to paste that GitHub link in right here. And then whenever I send this message, it's going to attempt to install this skill. And if it needs any input from me, it's going to let me know what to do next and help me troubleshoot and get it set up properly. Also, here's a quick heads up because the Google Workspace skill is a really good example of this. If you try installing this and it shows as blocked with an error like brew not installed, that just means that this skill needs an extra dependency in order to run. And since we deployed OpenClaw through Hostinger, you'll handle all of that from your VPS. So, if I navigate back to my browser here and then I go back up to Hostinger and go to my docker manager. If I need to install extra dependencies, I'll do so here in my Docker Manager. And if you need to communicate with your VPS directly, you can use your built-in terminal. You'll just install what the skill is missing, refresh, and it should unlock. And of course, if you get stuck, just try asking your assistant what it needs you to do, and follow the prompts. If you tell it that you're running OpenClaw on Hostinger and describe your exact setup, it's usually going to help you really quickly. Let me also show you how to set up recurring actions your AI assistant can run automatically by using something called cron jobs. Let's go back to the open claw control panel. And then on the lefth hand side, go into cron jobs. And on this screen, you'll have two main boxes. On the left, this box is just the status. You'll see if theuler is enabled, how many jobs you have, and the next time it's going to wake up. And on the right is where you create a job. Let's start by giving our job a name. I'll name this summarize emails and meetings. You can add a description if you want to. Next, let's go down to the schedule. Right now, it's set for every 30 minutes. So, for example, I could change this to one and then from minutes to days. And lastly, we need to tell the AI what this job is. That's what you put into the system text box here. So, I'll type check my Gmail and Google calendar. summarize anything important since the last run. Then send me a short update on Telegram. So now with this job, for every single day, it's going to summarize my Gmail in Google calendar and then it's going to send me a message on Telegram with anything important. Once you're happy with this, just click on add job and then you'll see that new job down here. And that's it. Your assistant is now going to run this job automatically on the schedule that you chose. And once you get the hang of this, you can schedule basically anything. If it's a task that you want your assistant to handle automatically, just turn it into a job here. Now, let's talk about managing your deployments and your VPS. Let's go back to the hosting or docker manager tab. And this is basically your control panel. Anytime you need to restart OpenClaw, redeploy it, swap API keys or environment variables, or manage other containers later, you're going to do it here. And once everything is set up with OpenClaw, Hostinger is where you manage the VPS itself. You'll find your miscellaneous settings here if you want to change out your OS and control panel, configure backups and monitoring, set up security, or connect a domain later. And as I mentioned before, you have access to a built-in terminal here in the top right. And that's how you're going to communicate with your VPS directly. Okay, we're almost done. However, please do keep in mind that OpenClaw is still an experimental tool. It's powerful, but once it has access to things like your emails, calendar, and files, you want to be smart about security, especially if you're letting it run on its own. So, right after this video, I'd do these four things to keep you, your assistant, and your data safe. First, make sure backups are turned on in Hostinger. In H panel, you can enable automatic backups. And by default, it's often set to weekly. If you can, upgrade that to daily backups so you can recover your data quickly just in case anything breaks. Second, lock down your dashboard access. Basically, don't leave your OpenClaw dashboard sitting on a public link that anyone can hit. At a minimum, use a strong password. And if you have the option, restrict access so only you can reach it, like limiting it to your IP or putting it behind a private tunnel or VPN. Third, use a security certificate if you add a domain. This isn't required, but it is a good upgrade. Having a security certificate means your connection to the dashboard is encrypted, and you usually set it up with a free SSL certificate through your domain or proxy setup. That way, you're not signing in or viewing data over a plain unencrypted domain. And fourth, and most important, treat your tokens like passwords. Your gateway token, Telegram bot token, and API keys are basically keys to your entire setup. Don't paste them into public places. Don't screenshot them. And if you think one leaked, you need to change it immediately and replace it in your Hostinger environment variables. And make sure you don't forget to use the first link in the video description when you're signing up for Hostinger. By using that link, you'll automatically get the lowest price available on all VPS plans. Thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in the next