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VOOZH | about |
By Amit Jotwani
Developer Educator
Note: As of January 29, 2026, Moltbot is now known as OpenClaw.
Iโd been wanting to try running Moltbot on DigitalOcean but hadnโt gotten around to it. Then Naderโs tweet and excellent gist showed up over the weekend, and of course I had to give it a shot. This guide is everything I learned along the way.
Moltbot (formerly known as Clawdbot and created by Peter Steinberger) is a personal, always-running assistant powered by your LLM of choice - Anthropic, OpenAI, or local models. As โthe AI that actually does thingsโ, you can host it on your own machine, and it can execute a variety of tasks, such as managing your calendar, browsing the web, organizing your files, managing your emails, and running terminal commands. You interact with it through standard chat apps that you already use - WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram - instead of a new app or UI. It keeps state, supports skills, and gets more useful as you wire more things into it.
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Amit is a Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean ๐ณ, where he helps developers build and ship better apps on the cloud. Compulsive Seinfeld quoter. LEGO nerd. ๐งฑ AMA.
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Thanks for sharing such helpful instructions, really appreciate your help.
Amit, will other users be able to chat to the bot through whatsapp?
This is a great article. How secure is this setup from outside access?
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