OpenClaw Gateway Hardening and Operations on AWS

This project documents how a default OpenClaw setup was converted into a safer operational deployment. The core focus was reducing control-plane fragility: auth mismatch failures, remote access confusion, and manual deployment risk.

Why this mattered

The deployment worked initially, but daily operations exposed predictable pain points:

• Gateway auth drift created intermittent unauthorized failures.
• Remote connectivity assumptions around bind/transport were inconsistent.
• Website updates were manual and easy to break.

Goal: keep operations simple while enforcing safer defaults.

Gateway bind and auth model

OpenClaw bind behavior must follow platform-supported modes, not raw socket assumptions. For broad interface listen, bind: "lan" maps to 0.0.0.0. Non-loopback exposure requires shared-secret auth.

{
  "gateway": {
    "mode": "local",
    "bind": "lan",
    "auth": {
      "mode": "token",
      "token": "<redacted>"
    }
  }
}

Auth mismatch failure mode

The most common outage pattern was gateway token mismatch between server auth and remote client settings.

# Known-good parity check
openclaw config get gateway.auth.token --json
openclaw config get gateway.remote.token --json

# If mismatched, reset both to same value then restart
openclaw gateway restart

This removed repeated gateway closed (1008): unauthorized failures in normal admin workflows.

Safe remote access notes

Direct plaintext remote control flows are error-prone and unsafe. Operationally, stable patterns were:

• Loopback + SSH tunnel for low-friction secure control.
• TLS-backed access patterns when remote direct access is required.

Practical outcome: fewer connection-policy surprises and cleaner troubleshooting.

Website delivery pipeline

The site was hosted on S3/CloudFront without clean source provenance. Workflow was rebuilt around a managed local copy plus scripted deploy.

# deploy flow (simplified)
python3 scripts/render_projects.py
aws s3 sync site-managed/ s3://<bucket> --delete
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id <id> --paths '/*'

Before high-impact changes, a full static snapshot was taken for recovery.

IAM gotcha encountered

Initial deploy failed because object write permissions were incomplete. Required actions included bucket list + object read/write/delete + CloudFront invalidation.

{
  "Action": ["s3:ListBucket", "s3:GetObject", "s3:PutObject", "s3:DeleteObject", "cloudfront:CreateInvalidation"],
  "Effect": "Allow"
}

Results

• Auth-related gateway interruptions were eliminated after token parity standardization.
• Deploy and content update process became deterministic and script-driven.
• Rollback confidence improved via pre-change backups.

Architecture Diagram

Sanitized note

No secrets, tokens, or internal identifiers are included here. This page focuses on implementation patterns and operations lessons.