openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix gateway launchd plist missing WorkingDirectory → ENOENT on every agent turn (relative agentDir resolves under cwd=/) [2 comments, 3 participants]

Summary

The ai.openclaw.gateway.plist rendered by openclaw service install (and re-rendered by openclaw update) does not include a <key>WorkingDirectory</key>. launchd therefore starts the gateway with cwd=/.

Combined with the default ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json — which ships with a relative "agentDir": "./agents/main" — every agent turn crashes because the path resolves to /agents/main:

ENOENT: no such file or directory, mkdir '/agents/main'

Users see this in the UI as:

⚠️ Something went wrong while processing your request. Please try again, or use /new to start a fresh session.

Environment

• openclaw 2026.4.21 (f788c88)
• macOS 26.4 (25E246)
• Installed via openclaw service install (launchd user agent)

Reproduction

1. Fresh install on macOS: npm i -g openclaw && openclaw service install
2. Confirm the rendered plist has no WorkingDirectory:

   plutil -extract WorkingDirectory raw ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.openclaw.gateway.plist
   # → Could not extract key "WorkingDirectory" from "..."

3. Confirm the default config uses a relative agentDir:

   grep agentDir ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json
   # → "agentDir": "./agents/main",

4. Confirm the daemon is running with cwd=/:

   lsof -a -p "$(launchctl print gui/$(id -u)/ai.openclaw.gateway | awk '/pid =/ {print $3}')" -d cwd
   # → cwd DIR ... /

5. Send any prompt from a client → the gateway logs:

   [AgentStore] failed to ensure agentDir: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, mkdir '/agents/main'

Root cause

Two interacting defaults collide:

• openclaw.json default uses a relative agentDir (./agents/main), which is resolved relative to process.cwd().
• The launchd plist renderer does not set WorkingDirectory, and launchd defaults cwd to / when the key is absent.

Either one alone would be fine. Together, every agent turn explodes.

Proposed fixes (pick one)

Option A — render WorkingDirectory in the gateway plist template (smallest change, matches how most launchd agents are written):

<key>WorkingDirectory</key>
<string>$HOME</string>

…where $HOME is resolved at install time (launchd does not expand $HOME in plist strings).

Option B — resolve agentDir to an absolute path when reading openclaw.json (more defensive; also fixes the same class of bug for systemd / Windows Task Scheduler if they ever land with cwd=/).

Anchor relative agentDir (and any other relative path keys) to the directory of the loaded openclaw.json — i.e. ~/.openclaw/ — rather than process.cwd().

Option A + B together would be belt-and-braces. Personally I'd take B because it is robust against any future service manager that launches with an unhelpful cwd.

Workaround

For anyone hitting this right now, insert the key manually and reload:

plutil -insert WorkingDirectory -string \"$HOME\" ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.openclaw.gateway.plist
launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/ai.openclaw.gateway 2>/dev/null || true
launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.openclaw.gateway.plist

Note that `openclaw update` re-renders the plist and therefore re-introduces the bug — the workaround has to be re-applied after every update until this is fixed upstream.

Context

Found while maintaining an MCP bridge that exercises agent turns on every run (openclaw-local-bridge-macos). Discovered after `openclaw update` from 2026.4.15 → 2026.4.21 restarted the gateway under launchd and every subsequent agent turn began failing with the ENOENT above. 2026.4.15 was affected by the same bug but happened to be running from a shell (cwd=$HOME), which masked it.

Happy to send a PR for either option if that's useful — just let me know which you'd prefer.