OpenClaw merged PR #127713 tonight, fixing a first-run macOS onboarding failure around inference plugin activation and Gateway restarts.
The bug hit a sensitive part of the setup flow. A fresh macOS AI setup can install an inference plugin and require the Gateway to restart. During that handoff, the activation response could arrive while the old socket was retiring. OpenClaw then misread the fresh activation as a pre-existing model and opened the normal dashboard instead of continuing into the Custodian onboarding screen.
Remote CLI onboarding had a related edge case: it could accept a typed transient verification failure during the restart window instead of waiting through the expected Gateway replacement.
What Changed
The fix carries the restart fact through the setup protocol. The config commit owns whether activation requires a Gateway restart, so the activation response now reports that status explicitly.
On macOS, onboarding keeps the original fresh-activation kind across the lease replacement. It waits for a healthy Gateway on the same route, verifies the persisted transition and exact model, then hands off to Custodian. If inference was genuinely already verified before setup, OpenClaw still opens the normal dashboard.
Remote CLI onboarding now uses the same bounded restart deadline and retries both rejected requests and typed unavailable verification results before entering the guided OpenClaw flow.
The PR description notes that the repair is generic to inference-plugin activation rather than special-casing Codex.
Why It Matters
First-run setup has very little room for ambiguity. A user who just installed a local or hosted inference path needs the system to distinguish between two very different states:
- setup succeeded, but the Gateway is restarting;
- setup was already complete before this flow began.
Before this patch, those states could collapse together. That meant a user could be sent to the dashboard too early or see a false inference failure during a normal restart.
PR #127713 makes the restart an explicit part of the activation contract. The onboarding clients no longer have to infer intent from a changing socket lifecycle.
User Impact
For new macOS users, the visible effect is smoother setup. After OpenClaw installs an inference plugin, onboarding waits for the restarted Gateway and then continues to Custodian instead of skipping the rest of the first-run path.
For remote CLI users, transient restart-window failures are retried within the same bounded deadline rather than being treated as final setup failures.
No new user-facing setting is required. The change is about preserving the setup state that already existed but was previously lost during the Gateway handoff.
Validation
The PR reports focused Vitest coverage for remote onboarding and inference setup, including rejected-request and typed-unavailable restart cases. It also extends the managed-Gateway restart regression to assert the observable Custodian onboarding handoff after replacement-route verification.
node scripts/check-changed.mjs passed formatting, policy guards, dead-code scans, production and test typechecking, and core lint. The PR notes that native macOS compilation and UI proof are left to exact-head hosted macOS CI because the authoring host lacks the macOS app surface.
Bottom Line
OpenClaw's macOS first-run flow now treats Gateway restarts as an expected setup phase, not a reason to lose the onboarding handoff.