vast jacinth
What I'm trying to do
Get a clean, working OpenClaw installation on Windows 11 + WSL2 (Ubuntu) so I can run the Gateway, agents and dashboard locally.
What's happening instead
The official installer finishes successfully, but openclaw is never added to PATH. Onboarding is skipped and the command stays unknown no matter what I try.
Exact reproduction steps
Fresh WSL2 Ubuntu (after wsl --unregister Ubuntu + wsl --install -d Ubuntu)
curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash
Installer says:
OpenClaw installed successfully!Settled in. Time to automate your life...INFO Skipping onboarding (openclaw not on PATH yet)WARN Installed, but openclaw is not discoverable on PATH... Try: hash -r
Then:Bashhash -r
source ~/.bashrc
openclaw --version→ openclaw: command not found
My setup
Windows 11 Pro + WSL2 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
Windows Node.js 22 already installed (in /mnt/c/Program Files/nodejs)
Using default npm global install (no pnpm, no nvm yet)
No other providers connected yet (just want basic local install)
Relevant outputs / logs
Bashwhich npm
→ /mnt/c/Program Files/nodejs//npm
npm config get prefix
→ \wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\stijn.npm-global ← note the Windows-style backslashes!
npm --version
10.9.3
echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n' | grep npm-global
/home/stijn/.npm-global/bin (appears 3x)
ls ~/.npm-global/bin
(empty or no openclaw binary)
cat ~/.bashrc | grep -E 'npm|PATH'
shows multiple export PATH="$HOME/.npm-global/bin:$PATH"
What I already tried (multiple times)
Full WSL reset + fresh distro
rm -rf ~/.npm-global ~/.npm ~/.openclaw
Manual npm config reset + export PATH="$HOME/.npm-global/bin:$PATH"
nvm install 22 && nvm use 22 (still same issue)
Re-running install.sh several times
wsl --shutdown + new terminal
Adding to ~/.profile and /etc/profile