What happened?

The openclaw gateway install command (and by extension any auto-install triggered by an OpenClaw update) writes a new LaunchAgent plist that does not preserve the existing PATH from the previous plist. On macOS, LaunchAgents do not source ~/.zshrc or any shell profile — they inherit only the environment variables explicitly embedded in the plist at install time. If the user's shell profile sets custom environment variables such as GOPATH, GOBIN, or additional PATH entries, those are silently dropped every time openclaw gateway install runs.

In our case, GOPATH and GOBIN were configured as ~/.local/gopath and ~/.local/gopath/bin. After the 2026.4.5 update ran gateway install, those exports were no longer present in the gateway's environment. Any skill or tool installed via go install — in our case blogwatcher — became silently unavailable to the agent even though the binary existed on disk and which blogwatcher worked correctly in an interactive shell.

No warning, no error, and no log entry indicated that PATH had changed. The agent simply reported tools as not found.

A secondary consequence: the update also dropped the GOPATH/GOBIN exports from ~/.zshrc itself (or they were never re-added after a previous update). This caused go install to fall back to the default ~/go/bin location instead of the configured ~/.local/gopath/bin, creating a split-brain state where reinstalling a binary placed it in the wrong directory.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install OpenClaw on macOS with a user account that has custom shell environment variables set in ~/.zshrc — specifically GOPATH, GOBIN, or any PATH additions outside the default Homebrew/system locations.
2. Install a Go-based skill binary via go install (for example blogwatcher). Confirm the agent can find and run it.
3. Run openclaw update or manually run openclaw gateway install (or openclaw gateway install --force).
4. Send any agent message that invokes the Go-based skill tool.
5. Observe: the agent reports the tool as not found. launchctl getenv PATH for the gateway process no longer contains the Go bin directory. The binary still exists on disk.

Expected behavior

openclaw gateway install should either:

• Read the existing plist before overwriting it and preserve any EnvironmentVariables entries that it did not itself write, or
• Warn the user explicitly that PATH and other environment variables in the plist will be reset, and document how to re-add custom entries after install, or
• Source ~/.zshrc or ~/.zprofile at install time to capture the user's full shell environment into the new plist.

The current behaviour silently degrades the agent's tool availability after every update with no indication to the user that anything has changed.

Version

2026.4.5 (3e72c03)