Clawwarden

A durable, policy-gated control plane for unattended OpenClaw workflows.

Clawwarden turns short OpenClaw lifecycle callbacks into persistent events processed by a separate worker. It provides idempotency, leases, bounded retry, dead letters, recovery lineage, review queues, a kill switch and independent liveness monitoring.

Architecture

OpenClaw lifecycle hooks
        ↓
Clawwarden Runtime plugin
        ↓
SQLite WAL event inbox
        ↓
Worker: lease → execute → retry/dead-letter
        ↓
Optional nmem, workflow, skill and artifact integrations

Secure defaults

• Automatic low-risk memory commits are disabled.
• Automatic failed-run resumption is disabled until explicitly enabled.
• Gateway restart is disabled.
• OpenClaw configuration backup is disabled.
• nmem export is disabled.
• Destructive, trading, credential, publication and live-skill actions remain policy-gated.
• Optional quota and artifact helpers must be explicitly configured.
• Raw prompts and assistant summaries are represented by hashes only unless local capture is explicitly enabled.
• The SQLite state database is created with owner-only permissions.
• State, databases, logs, archives, credentials and real OpenClaw configuration are blocked from Git.

Included components

• scripts/control_plane.py: SQLite WAL inbox, leases, retry, dead letters and recovery
• scripts/clawwarden.py: decision, ledger, review, governance and lifecycle CLI
• scripts/worker_watchdog.py: independent worker liveness watchdog
• scripts/workflow_ledger.py: durable task/checkpoint ledger
• scripts/nmem_adapter.py: optional nmem integration
• scripts/skill_staging.py: candidate-only reusable workflow staging
• plugin/openclaw: lifecycle bridge plugin

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Node.js 20+ for the OpenClaw plugin
• OpenClaw with the lifecycle hook API used by the runtime plugin
• macOS or Linux with fcntl
• Optional: nmem

The current plugin compatibility floor is OpenClaw 2026.7.1-beta.2; this tree was tested with the stable OpenClaw 2026.7.1 release.

Quick start

cp config.example.json config.json
chmod 600 config.json
python3 scripts/control_plane.py init
python3 scripts/control_plane.py status
node --test plugin/openclaw/tests/*.test.mjs

Copy the OpenClaw plugin configuration example and set scriptPath to this repository's scripts/control_plane.py. Keep production configuration outside Git.

Optional integrations

• Set CLAWWARDEN_QUOTA_HELPER to an executable JSON-producing quota helper.
• Set CLAWWARDEN_ARTIFACT_HELPER to an artifact lifecycle helper.
• Install nmem to enable semantic context and memory candidate workflows.

Missing optional integrations degrade to disabled; they do not silently trigger a fallback model or external service.

When a periodic event recovers, Clawwarden resolves an older dead-letter alert only when the successful event has the same type and a newer creation timestamp. Unrelated alerts remain active.

Commit and push gate

git init -b main
./scripts/install_git_hooks.sh
./scripts/preflight.sh

The gate requires gitleaks and fails closed. Scanner output contains file, line and rule only, never the suspected value.

Documentation

• Chinese README
• Security policy
• Release checklist
• Changelog

License

Apache-2.0.