Getting Started — Claw Patrol Docs

This guide takes you from zero to a working Claw Patrol gateway with one device wired in. The example config works as-is; once you want to tune anything, read Configure the gateway next.
Claw Patrol has two pieces: a gateway that runs on a server you control, and one or more devices — the machines where your agents run — that join the gateway and route agent traffic through it.
Gateway and device run the same clawpatrol binary — there's no separate server package. Install it on both the gateway host and any machine that will run agents:
The installer drops a single binary in ~/.local/bin. macOS and Linux on amd64/arm64 are supported.
On the server, pick a data directory (anywhere — /opt/clawpatrol, /srv/clawpatrol, your home), drop a copy of gateway.example.hcl into it, open UDP 51820 on the host firewall, and start the gateway:
The example config binds the dashboard to 127.0.0.1:8080. Reach it from your laptop with an SSH tunnel:
Open http://127.0.0.1:8080 and set the root password — that's the operator login. The CA certificate and private key are lazy-minted into sqlite under state_dir on first boot; there's nothing else to pre-create.
The example config enables dashboard_config_writes = true so the dashboard can turn an observed action into a generated deny rule, append it to gateway.hcl, validate the full candidate config, and hot-reload it. For Git-managed production policy, omit that field or set it to false; the dashboard will still generate HCL you can copy into your normal review flow.
The credentials in the example config (Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub, Slack, Notion, Grafana) are declared in HCL, but each one still has to be connected before it can be used. Open the dashboard's settings page (the gear icon); you'll see a card for every credential the HCL wires up. Click each card to connect it. The OAuth-backed credentials (Anthropic subscription, OpenAI Codex, GitHub, Notion) bounce you through the provider's OAuth flow. The rest (the manual Anthropic key, the Grafana bearer token, the Slack tokens) open a modal where you paste the secret. A card stays marked "Not connected" until you finish that step. Once every credential you actually plan to use is connected, you're ready to enroll a device.
On any machine where you want to run an agent — your laptop, a CI runner, an EC2 instance, anywhere you'd otherwise run the agent directly:
You'll see a one-time code. Open the URL it prints, confirm the code matches in the dashboard, and approve. Once approved the device is enrolled, the gateway CA is installed in the device's system trust store, and clawpatrol env is wired into your shell rc.
By default join sets up per-process routing: only commands you wrap with clawpatrol run go through the gateway. Pass --whole-machine if you want every packet on the host to route through it.
On macOS, the first join prompts you to approve the Claw Patrol Network Extension in System Settings → Privacy & Security.
Don't run clawpatrol join --whole-machine on the gateway host itself — the gateway shouldn't route its own traffic through itself; this would create a network loop that would break the gateway.
Wrap any command with clawpatrol run:
The gateway intercepts the wrapped process's network traffic, matches each request against the rules in gateway.hcl, injects the configured credential, and forwards the request upstream. The agent never sees the real key.
The example config is enough to kick the tyres, but before you point a real workload at the gateway you'll want to change the dashboard bind, paste real credentials, swap to Tailscale if that fits, run under systemd, and lock down state_dir. Continue with Configure the gateway.
Open-source under the MIT license.
Made by the folks at Deno.