#deactivate openClaw

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cloud canopy
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What is the best way to deactivate openclaw? I am running several agents on some linux boxes and have the need to deactivate unneeded agents

vale remnantBOT
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rugged cragBOT
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Best path depends on whether you mean “stop OpenClaw on that Linux box” or “keep the Gateway running but remove some configured agents”:

Stop/deactivate the whole OpenClaw service on a box:

openclaw gateway status
openclaw gateway stop

That stops the managed Gateway service. If you don’t want it to auto-start there anymore, uninstall the service:

openclaw gateway uninstall

Deactivate only an unused agent while keeping OpenClaw running:

  1. See what exists / what routes to it:
openclaw agents list --bindings
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  1. If you want to keep its workspace/state but stop routing traffic to it:
openclaw agents unbind --agent <agent-id> --all
openclaw gateway restart
  1. If you’re sure it’s no longer needed:
openclaw agents delete <agent-id>
openclaw gateway restart

main can’t be deleted, and agent delete moves workspace/state/session dirs to Trash rather than hard-deleting them.

If these agents have heartbeats configured, also disable the heartbeat for agents you’re keeping-but-idling, otherwise they can still spend tokens. The heartbeat docs mention agents.defaults.heartbeat.every / per-agent agents.list[].heartbeat.every, with 0m disabling it.

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/agents and https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/gateway

If anything behaves differently, first thing I’d ask for is:

# 
openclaw --version
openclaw agents list --bindings
openclaw gateway status
cloud canopy
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every agent has its own gateway. And it's exactly the issue that it keeps spending tokens or "acting up" on Telegram although not needed.

rugged cragBOT
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Ah, got it — if each “agent” is actually its own Gateway on its own Linux box, then don’t try to delete agents inside one config. Treat each box as an OpenClaw service and shut down or uninstall that Gateway.

For a box you don’t need right now:

openclaw gateway status
openclaw gateway stop

If you want it to stay off across reboots / not come back as a service:

openclaw gateway uninstall

If you may use it later and just want to stop token spend / Telegram behavior, I’d do this safer two-step:

  1. Stop the Gateway:
# 
openclaw gateway stop
  1. Disable heartbeat so it won’t burn tokens when you start it again later:
openclaw config set agents.defaults.heartbeat.every "0m"

If Telegram itself is the “acting up” path, either remove that channel account or make it fail-closed. The blunt option is:

openclaw channels remove --channel telegram --delete
openclaw gateway restart

Only do that if you’re okay disconnecting that Telegram bot from that Gateway.

Quick verification after stopping: