OpenClaw Tutorial for Beginners - Full Setup Guide

Hey, I'm Caleb and this video I'll teach you exactly how to set up open claw step-by-step so you can have your own AI assistant running 24/7 and actually doing real tasks for you on a schedule. If you've been hearing about open claw and want to learn how to go from nothing to a fully working assistant that lives on your phone, runs jobs automatically, and sends you messages first without you having to ask, I'm going to walk you through all of it even if you've never touched a server or done anything like this before. So, here's what to expect next in this video. First, we'll deploy open claw on a VPS, which is basically just a separate computer in the cloud. We're using one so your assistant stays online 24/7 and stays completely separate from your personal machine. Next, we'll connect an AI model to give your assistant a brain. This is what lets it actually think and makes decisions and I'll show you exactly how to set that up. Then, we'll connect Telegram so you can message your assistant from your phone or desktop just like texting a real person. After that, we'll install a skill, create a schedule job, and test it so you can see how everything works. And then, we'll lock everything down with a quick security checklist. So with that said, let's jump into the first step, which is setting up your VPS and deploying open claw. And to make this whole process as beginner-friendly as possible, we'll be using Hostinger. They have a one-click template that installs everything you need to run open claw automatically. To begin, go to this link on screen right here or click the first link in the video description. That link will take you directly to the Hostinger setup page and make sure you're getting the lowest pricing available. Once you go to that link, you'll be brought to this page right here. Let's start in the top right here by choosing our VPS plan. By default, this will be set to KVM 2. However, if you want to save a little bit of money and start smaller, you can also switch to the KVM 1 plan. And if you find that you need more resources later on, you can always upgrade your plan in the future. With KVM 1 selected, I'm going to go down and click on deploy. And then on this page here, you can start by choosing your billing period. By default, this will be set to 24 months, which is a very long-term commitment. If you're wanting to save a little bit more money and go with a shorter-term commitment, you can switch this from 24 months to 12 months as well. The 12-month plan is still going to get you plenty of savings and a free domain for the first year. Let's go ahead and scroll down this page here. And I'm going to toggle off ready-to-use AI. I'm doing this because we're actually going to add in our own API keys later on in the video. And then further down the page here, you'll see some additional add-ons. You can look through all of these and see if you want to add them in, but for this video, I'm just going to leave them turned off. Then lastly, at the bottom of the page, go ahead and choose your server location. By default, Hostinger is going to choose the best server for you. So, I'm just going to leave this as the default location. With that done, let's go ahead and scroll up to the top of the page and you can review your order here and make sure that the coupon is applied. And again, if you use the first link in the video description, this is going to automatically apply this extra discount. With all of that done, let's go ahead and click on continue. Then on this page here, you'll need to register for a Hostinger account. Go ahead and enter your email address and create a password. Click on register. And then here, you'll need to fill out your billing address and your payment information. Go ahead and fill out all this information here, go through the checkout process, and I'll meet you at the next step. All right, once you've gone through the checkout process, go ahead and click on get started. Okay, and after that, you'll be brought into the open claw configuration page. The first thing you'll see here up at the top is the open claw gateway token. I'll go ahead and click on the eyeball button to reveal this. And then you'll want to copy this and save it somewhere safe. In this video, I'm showing you my open claw gateway token, but you want to make sure that you never show your token to anybody else. After this video, I plan on regenerating this token and starting fresh because this token is now compromised. If someone gets access to this token, they can access your entire open claw setup, which can be very dangerous. So, make sure you keep this secure and safe. Now, the next thing we want to look at here is our API key. Below this, you'll see a bunch of different providers. You'll have Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and more. You can choose between any of these. For this video, I'll be going with OpenAI. To access the dashboard, I'm going to highlight the link listed below here, right-click on it, and I'll go to this link. Then here, I'll click on create API keys. For the name, I'll just name this open claw and I'll go down and click on create secret key. Then I'll copy this. And again, make sure you don't share this with anybody. I'll switch back over to Hostinger and I'll paste in the key right here. Now, another quick tip here, make sure you configure billing within your API key provider. Depending on which provider you go with, the billing setup will look a little bit different. But the main thing is that you want to make sure you have a payment method added and you also set up limits that way you don't end up spending way more money than you expect. Now, let's scroll down to the bottom of the page here. And here we'll find our Telegram bot token. We're going to set up Telegram so that way we don't have to constantly access our open claw dashboard. With Telegram configuration, we can actually message our AI assistant directly from our phone or our computer by using the Telegram app. So, let me quickly show you how to get access to this token. Start by opening up Telegram either on your desktop or your mobile device. Then at the top here, you'll search for @BotFather. You'll be looking for this one here with the verified check mark. Go ahead and click on this. Then go down here and click on start. At the top, click on new bot. Then we need to give it a name. I'll name this one Caleb's assistant and send it. Now, we need to choose a username for the bot. I'll go with MedicsMedia tutorial bot and send this message. And if that username is available, you'll get this message right here. This link is how you'll access your bot and we're going to click on this in just a few moments. For now, we want to go down and find our token. I'm going to click on this token right here to copy it and I'll switch back over to Hostinger. Then I'm going to paste in the bot token right here. And it's also smart to save this somewhere safe. All right, and with that done, let's go down and click on deploy. You may get this onboarding survey right here. Just go down and click on skip. And right now, as you can see, our open claw container is currently deploying. This can take a few minutes, so I'm going to fast forward to whenever it's complete. All right, now as you can see here, the status has changed to running, which shows us that everything was deployed properly. Now, before we access our open claw dashboard, let me show you a couple important settings that will be helpful to remember later. The first one here is your gateway token. If you ever lose it or forget it, click on this button right here to copy it again. Next, click into manage. Then scroll down the page here and click into environment. This will open up your environment variables. It's where you'll find your open claw gateway token, your API keys, and your Telegram bot token. This is important because if you ever need to regenerate any of your tokens, you can do so right here by editing the values. And if you need to add in a new environment variable, you can do so by scrolling down and clicking on environment. All right, now let's access our open claw dashboard. Let's scroll all the way to the top of the page and click on cancel. From here, click on open. In this field right here, paste in your open claw gateway token and click login. And this is going to open up your open claw dashboard. By default, you'll be in the chat window. You'll also notice some other tabs here on the left. Feel free to jump in and explore all of these different tabs, but for beginners, I'd recommend setting up everything within the chat window. Open claw is actually able to rewrite its own code and configure itself based on what you say. So, you don't actually have to jump into any of these tabs to start. You can just tell open claw what you want to do and it's going to help you out. Now that we're here, the first thing we'll do is go back into Telegram. So, I'm going to open up the desktop app again and I'll click on this link from earlier. Go down and click on start. And you'll get a message here that says open claw access not configured. So, go down here and find this command. This will contain your pairing code. Copy this and switch back over to your open claw dashboard. Paste in the command right here and send this message. We'll wait a few moments to get a response here. And right here it says done, approved the Telegram pairing request. So now, let's make sure that everything is working properly on Telegram. So, I'll switch back over to the desktop app. Then I'll send a message to my bot. I'll say is everything working properly? Send it. And we should get a response here. And there we go. We now have a response from our open claw assistant directly in Telegram. It's going to give us some information here and basically a general status update, but as for open claw configuration with Telegram, we're good to go. Now that your assistant is connected, let's give it the ability to actually do things. Right now, it can chat with you, but the real power of open claw comes from skills. Skills are what let your assistant connect to real tools and perform real tasks. There are skills for all kinds of things. You can connect your assistant to Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Discord, social media platforms, and a lot more. You can browse and find skills yourself on a website called ClawHub, or you can go through the GitHub skills repository. I'll leave links to both of these in the description. Just be careful with skills from third-party sources. Always check what a skill does before you install it and stick with official or well-reviewed ones. However, the easiest way to get started here is by asking your assistant. So, let me show you how this works. In Telegram, I'm going to send a message to my assistant. Down here, I'll ask, "What skills can I install?" And send it. And right here, I get a short list of what skills I can install. For example, here I could get a Google Workspace skill, GitHub, Slack, Brave Search, along with Discord and Notion. One of the best first skills you can install is the Google Workspace or GOG skill. For example, if I want my assistant to be able to read my Gmail and check my Google Calendar, this is a great skill to install first. So, here I'll type, "Let's install the GOG skill. Can you walk me through it?" And here, it's going to give us the next steps that we need to follow. From here, you'll just follow the setup steps, work with your assistant, and if you run into any problems, just work it out with your assistant directly. Tell it exactly what issue you're facing, and it's going to help you troubleshoot that exact problem. So, off camera here, I'm going to go through and install the GOG skill, get everything set up, and then after this, we'll set up a job. Okay, so now the Google Workspace skill is installed and connected. I gave it access to my Gmail and Google Calendar. So, now that the skill is installed and configured, this is where things get really good. Now that your assistant has the ability to actually do something, you can create a job. A job is a scheduled task that runs automatically without you having to ask. So, here's what I'm going to say. Every morning at 8:00 a.m., check my Google Calendar for the day, scan my Gmail inbox for anything important, and send me a summary on Telegram with my top priorities. So, I'll go ahead and send this here. And there we go. It's now been set up as a daily morning brief. Every day at 8:00 a.m., it's going to check my Google Calendar, scan my Gmail for important messages, and send me a Telegram summary with my top priorities for the day. Now, let's go ahead and see what that job is actually going to look like. Here, I'll type, "Run this job right now, so I can see what it looks like." I'll send that here. And there we go. It's now created my daily brief using actual information from my Google Workspace. It organizes everything here for me. I have my calendar, an important email, other inbox items, and then my top three priorities. And this right here is the whole pattern. You install a skill to give your assistant a new ability, and then you create a job to put that ability to work on a schedule. From here, you'll keep stacking new skills and jobs just like this. Experiment with what could be useful in your day-to-day life, and you'll find that your assistant will get more and more capable over time. All right, now before we go any further, let's go ahead and increase our OpenClaw security. I've put together a single message that you can copy and paste into your OpenClaw chat that will handle all of the baseline security for you. And you're going to find this linked in the video description. So, I'm going to go ahead and copy the message here, and I'll paste it in right here. What this does is it tells your assistant to go to the official OpenClaw security docs and apply all of the recommended settings. It also sets approval gates, so your assistant has to get your permission before it sends messages on your behalf, deletes files, or makes network requests. And it will also add cost guardrails. So, if a task fails three times, it stops, and nothing can run longer than 10 minutes unless you say otherwise. Combined with the spend limit you set earlier for your API keys, you'll be covered, and you won't have any crazy charges. Now, once I send this, the assistant is going to run through everything and confirm when it's done. And here, as you can see, the assistant has reviewed the recommended security settings and made sure everything is configured properly. Now, the last thing I want to do here for security is go back into Hostinger. Switch back over to it here. And let's go over some of the tabs here on the left-hand side. Right now, we're currently in the Docker manager. However, below this, you'll find your settings for your VPS, your operating system and panel, backups and monitoring, extra security settings, and your domain and DNS settings. Let's click into backups and monitoring here. And here is where you can configure your backup schedule. By default, it'll be set to weekly. And then below that, you can create a snapshot. Right here, I'll click on create snapshot, and create. This is going to save a copy of your VPS as it is right now. That way, if anything ever breaks while you're experimenting, you can restore back to this version in minutes. So, I'd always recommend before doing any major changes to your VPS that you create a snapshot. And lastly, I'll switch back over to Telegram. And then from here, just start small. Get comfortable with how your assistant works before you connect anything sensitive. You can always add in more skills and continue expanding from here. And if you haven't purchased your VPS plan just yet, make sure you use the first link in the video description to get the lowest pricing available. Thanks for watching this video. I really hope it helped you out. And with that said, I'll see you in the next one.