AUTOMATION

Production Agent on VPS (DigitalOcean / AWS / Hetzner)

Deploy a 24/7 autonomous agent on a cloud VPS in under 1 hour

Updated: 2/23/2026
Difficulty
medium
Time
1 hour
Use Case
infrastructure
Popularity
0 views

About this automation

Step-by-step guide to deploy OpenClaw on a VPS with systemd auto-restart, Telegram notifications, and a hardened security setup. The most common production deployment pattern — under $10/month on Hetzner or $12/month on DigitalOcean.

How to implement

1

Provision VPS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM minimum

2

Install Node.js 22+: `curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo bash -`

3

Install OpenClaw: `sudo npm install -g openclaw`

4

Configure via: `openclaw configure` (add API keys, Telegram bot token)

5

Enable systemd service: `openclaw gateway install && systemctl --user enable openclaw-gateway`

6

Set up auto-update cron: runs `openclaw update` nightly at 3am

7

Harden: disable root SSH, set up UFW firewall, enable fail2ban