How to set up Clawdbot on Digital Ocean

setup.md

Clawdbot on DigitalOcean

1. Create a Droplet

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, nearest region

2. Select Premium AMD

2 GB RAM / 1 AMD CPU / 50 GB NVMe

3. SSH into server

ssh root@YOUR_IP

4. Create sudo user

adduser clawd && usermod -aG sudo clawd && su - clawd

5. Install Clawdbot

curl -fsSL https://clawd.bot/install.sh | bash

Then run exec bash

6. Configure API keys

clawdbot setup --wizard

7. Start gateway

clawdbot gateway --bind lan --port 18789

8. SSH tunnel to access UI

ssh -L 18789:127.0.0.1:18789 clawd@YOUR_IP

Open http://127.0.0.1:18789

running Anthropic and a Telegram setup on a 1GB droplet will throw out of memory during the NPM install.

What could help:

export NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=2048"

Alternatively, you may need to add swap if the above doesn't help:

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile || sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=2048
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Hi @mpeshev thanks for chiming in, do you think I should just update to mention to provision 2GB instead of 1GB?

@dabit3 2GB is a safer recommendation overall (a higher build), but 2x the cost may be prohibitive to some.

1GB with NODE_OPTIONS seems to bypass the setup limits and works fine for simple tasks after.