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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
By Andrew Dugan
Senior AI Technical Content Creator II
OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot) is an open-source, self-hosted personal AI assistant that can run directly on your computer. It can execute a variety of tasks, such as managing your calendar, browsing the web, organizing files, managing your email, and running terminal commands. It supports any Large Language Model (LLM), and you can communicate with it through standard chat apps that you already use like WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Discord, or Slack.
While it is technically possible to run OpenClaw on your local machine, security concerns arise when giving an AI agent open access to your computer with all of your personal data on it. A better approach is to deploy it on a separate machine specifically for OpenClaw or to deploy it on a cloud server.
There are 3 ways to deploy OpenClaw with DigitalOcean. You can either deploy yourself on a DigitalOcean Droplet, deploy with a pre-built 1-Click Application in the Droplet Marketplace, or use the DigitalOcean App Platform. Each of these options will have different security and maintenance considerations, so choose an option based on your app’s needs.
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Andrew is an NLP Scientist with 8 years of experience designing and deploying enterprise AI applications and language processing systems.
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Thank you for this useful guide and the Molt integration!
Could you share more detail regarding Gradient AI integration, does it work only whith anthropic ?
Thanks! I installed the one-click Moltbot v2026.1.24-1 from the marketplace, before it was renamed to OpenClaw.
Current version is openclaw 2026.1.30, but /opt/update-clawdbot.sh said it was up to date so it didn’t upgrade and stayed at v2026.1.24-1
A couple of suggestions:
Is this still using the old “clawdbot” repo, or is it on the new OpenClaw?
Choice of models too limited. The openclawd self-update didn’t work because of git permissions. Could fix those but the digitalocean setup seems to be quite fragile and the intraction with clawd itself is not clear. Tried to make it work with mistral.ai and gave up.
Has anyone had success recreating the docker image in this droplet? I get tons of errors and issues.
I enjoy the quick 1-click deploy option with DO, but wonder how the openClaw version can stay up to date with this packaged install?
Tried this a few times. Rife with issues. Don’t even bother
Does WhatsApp actually work reliably on your VPS instances?
OpenClaw uses Baileys, which requires a persistent WebSocket connection to WhatsApp’s servers. Do your droplets have any NAT, firewall, or rate-limiting behaviour that could interrupt long-lived outbound WebSocket connections?
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