u-claw/install

One-line install

Installs OpenClaw, the skills and a model configuration in a single command, without a USB drive.

Install

Mac / Linux

curl -fsSL https://u-claw.org/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://u-claw.org/install.ps1 | iex

From a checkout

bash install/install.sh                                          # Mac / Linux
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install\install.ps1     # Windows

These pipe a script from the network straight into a shell. That pattern is widely warned about, and on a managed corporate machine an EDR agent will often block it outright. If you are on a work laptop, use the USB build instead — that is what it is for.

What it does

Step	Mac / Linux	Windows
1	Node.js — into ~/.uclaw/runtime/, or reuses the system copy if it is v20+	same, under %USERPROFILE%\.uclaw\
2	OpenClaw via npm	downloads a pre-built bundle, checksum verified
3	QQ plugin — optional, a failure here does not stop anything else	same
4	Skills — read from skills/manifest.json, fetched from the repo	same
5	Model — pick one and paste a key	same
6	Start script — start.command / start.sh	start.bat
7	Verify what landed	same

Neither script contains any skill text of its own. Both call lib/install-skills.mjs, which is the same installer the USB build and the release pipeline use — that is what keeps the two platforms from drifting apart, which they had badly done before.

Models

The menu leads with what is easiest to get working:

	Model	Why
1	Gemini	Easiest key to obtain — Google account, no card, free tier
2	Claude	Best all-rounder
3	GPT	Most widely used
4	OpenRouter	One key across many models
5	SEA-LION	Malay, Tamil and Singlish. Free, but rate-limited to 10 requests a minute
6	Local	Runs offline through Ollama
7	Other	Paste your own endpoint and model name

Others — DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, GLM and so on — work fine through option 7.

Where things land

~/.uclaw/
├── runtime/node-{platform}/       Node.js
├── core/                          OpenClaw and plugins
│   └── node_modules/openclaw/skills/     installed skills
├── data/
│   ├── .openclaw/openclaw.json    your model and key
│   ├── memory/                    what the AI remembers
│   └── backups/
└── start.command | start.sh | start.bat

Notes

• Nothing touches your system Node. It installs into ~/.uclaw/runtime/, and reuses a system copy only if it is already v20 or newer.
• Download sources are nodejs.org and registry.npmjs.org; the Windows bundle comes from our own releases and its SHA256 is checked before it is unpacked. Until recently the only check was "is the file bigger than 1MB", which is not a check.
• Piped mode: under curl | bash there is no terminal to prompt on, so it takes the defaults and you set the model afterwards.
• Uninstall: rm -rf ~/.uclaw, or delete %USERPROFILE%\.uclaw on Windows.

How this relates to the other builds

install/     one-line install over the network — this module
portable/    the USB build, the main product
bootable/    a Linux USB that boots a machine with no OS
u-claw-app/  Electron desktop app — deprecated, kept for archive

The result is the same as running advanced/Mac-Install.command from the USB build. The difference is only that everything is fetched from the network rather than copied off a drive.