Upgrade Guard 🔄

Never lose a working OpenClaw to a bad upgrade again.

Born from 7 cascading failures during a single version jump. The gateway crashed, Telegram disconnected, plugins broke, models vanished — and the AI agent that caused it was also dead, so nobody could fix it remotely.

This skill makes upgrades safe.

The Problem

OpenClaw upgrades can break in ways that are invisible until it's too late:

A single git pull && pnpm install can trigger all of these simultaneously.

What Upgrade Guard Does

1. Snapshot (snapshot)

Captures your entire working state:

• Version + git commit
• Full config backup
• Plugin file inventory
• Symlink map
• Lock file
• Channel list + model info
• Gateway health status

2. Pre-flight (check)

Before touching anything:

• Snapshot exists?
• Config valid?
• Git repo clean?
• Disk space OK?
• Package manager available?
• Remote changes preview
• Breaking change detection (scans commit messages)

3. Safe Upgrade (upgrade)

Controlled 6-step process:

1. Pre-flight checks (abort if fail)
2. Fresh snapshot
3. Stop gateway
4. git pull (rollback on fail)
5. pnpm install + pnpm run build (rollback on fail)
6. Post-upgrade verification

4. Verification (verify)

After upgrade, checks everything:

• Version actually changed?
• Plugin files renamed/removed? (detects clawdbot↔openclaw renames)
• Config still valid JSON?
• All channels still configured?
• Model still set?
• No broken symlinks?
• Gateway starts and responds?
• No errors in recent logs?

5. Rollback (rollback)

Emergency restore:

• Stop gateway
• Restore git to previous commit
• Reinstall old dependencies
• Restore config
• Restart gateway

Usage

# Before upgrading: take a snapshot
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh snapshot

# Check what's coming
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh check

# See current state
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh status

# Do the upgrade (safe, with auto-rollback on failure)
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh upgrade

# Or just preview without changing anything
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh upgrade --dry-run

# After upgrade: verify everything works
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh verify

# Something broke? Emergency rollback
bash scripts/upgrade-guard.sh rollback

For AI Agents

MANDATORY before any OpenClaw upgrade:

1. upgrade-guard.sh snapshot — save current state
2. upgrade-guard.sh check — verify pre-conditions
3. upgrade-guard.sh upgrade — let the script handle it
4. If anything fails → upgrade-guard.sh rollback

NEVER run blind git pull && pnpm install without snapshotting first.

What It Catches That config-guard Doesn't

Use both together: config-guard for config changes, upgrade-guard for version upgrades.

Watchdog — OS-Level Self-Healing

The watchdog runs independently via systemd timer. It survives gateway crashes, AI agent death, and server reboots.

# Install (checks every 60 seconds)
bash scripts/watchdog.sh install

# Check health manually
bash scripts/watchdog.sh check

# View status and recent events
bash scripts/watchdog.sh status

# Remove
bash scripts/watchdog.sh uninstall

Recovery strategy:

What it checks:

1. Process — is the gateway process running?
2. HTTP — does the gateway respond on its port?
3. Telegram — any connection errors in recent logs?

Why it works when everything else fails:

• Runs as systemd timer — survives gateway crash, AI death, reboots
• Checks every 60 seconds — detects problems fast
• 5-minute cooldown between actions — no restart loops
• Uses upgrade-guard's rollback — full version restore if restart doesn't help
• Logs everything to watchdog.log for post-mortem

Install

clawdhub install upgrade-guard
# or clone directly
git clone https://github.com/jzOcb/upgrade-guard

Requirements

• bash 4+
• python3
• curl
• git
• pnpm or npm

Related

• config-guard — Config validation and auto-rollback
• agent-guardrails — Code-level enforcement for AI agents