#How to activate ACP between OpenClaw and Hermes on same machine — does it handle shared memory autom

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humble salmon
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We have OpenClaw and Hermes both running on the same machine. The gateway logs show "acpx runtime backend registered" on OpenClaw startup. How do we activate ACP between OpenClaw and Hermes so they can communicate directly? Does ACP handle shared memory and context between the two agents automatically, or do we still need to manually share knowledge files?

craggy folioBOT
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patent lindenBOT
shy prismBOT
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Can you paste openclaw --version too? ACP moved pretty fast recently.

Short version: acpx runtime backend registered only means the ACP backend is available. It does not auto-pair Hermes.

If Hermes should talk to OpenClaw

Hermes needs to connect to the OpenClaw ACP bridge. That usually means configuring Hermes as an ACP client that runs something like:

openclaw acp --url ws://127.0.0.1:18789 --token-file ~/.openclaw/gateway.token --session agent:main:main

That gives Hermes a live ACP connection into one OpenClaw Gateway session.

If OpenClaw should launch Hermes

That only works if Hermes exposes an ACP adapter that acpx can run. If so, Hermes needs to be configured as an allowed ACP agent/harness, then you use /acp spawn <hermes-alias> or an ACP runtime config. The backend being registered alone is not enough.

Shared memory/context

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ACP does not automatically merge memory or knowledge bases between two separate agents.
It gives you transport + session routing.

So the rule is:

  • Same Gateway session key → they can share the same session transcript/context
  • Different agents/stores/workspaces → you still need a shared source of truth if you want durable knowledge sharing

So yes, for durable shared knowledge you still typically want one of:

  • shared workspace files
  • a shared memory/plugin store
  • MCP tools exposed from one side to the other
  • explicit sync/export logic

If your real goal is “Hermes should use OpenClaw’s tools/memory,” MCP is often the better fit than ACP.