Auto-Updater: Set-It-and-Forget-It Updates for Clawdbot and All Your Skills

14,000+ downloads and 88 stars — the Auto-Updater Skill by @maximeprades is one of ClawHub's most-starred utilities in the devops-cloud category. It does exactly one thing: keeps your Clawdbot installation and every installed skill up to date, automatically, every day.

The Problem It Solves

Every developer running Clawdbot locally knows the subtle dread of "how old is this?" — skills accumulate over weeks, Clawdbot itself ships patches frequently, and manually running clawdhub update --all is the kind of task that sounds quick but never actually happens. You discover you're running a skill version from three months ago when a bug you reported was fixed two months ago. The Auto-Updater Skill eliminates this entirely.

How It Works

The skill sets up a Clawdbot cron job — a scheduled task that runs inside an isolated session at a time you choose (default: 4 AM daily). The cron job:

1. Updates Clawdbot itself (via your package manager or clawdbot update for source installs)
2. Runs clawdbot doctor to apply any migrations
3. Updates all installed skills via clawdhub update --all
4. Sends you a formatted summary of what changed

Everything happens in the background. You wake up, open Clawdbot, and find a message like:

🔄 Daily Auto-Update Complete

Clawdbot: Updated to v2026.1.10 (was v2026.1.9)

Skills Updated (3):
- prd: 2.0.3 → 2.0.4
- browser: 1.2.0 → 1.2.1
- nano-banana-pro: 3.1.0 → 3.1.2

Skills Already Current (5):
gemini, sag, things-mac, himalaya, peekaboo

No issues encountered.

Setup

Quick Start (Recommended)

Just ask Clawdbot:

Set up daily auto-updates for yourself and all your skills.

Clawdbot will detect your installation type (npm, pnpm, bun, or source) and configure everything appropriately.

Manual Setup

clawdbot cron add \
  --name "Daily Auto-Update" \
  --cron "0 4 * * *" \
  --tz "America/Los_Angeles" \
  --session isolated \
  --wake now \
  --deliver \
  --message "Run daily auto-updates: check for Clawdbot updates and update all skills. Report what was updated."

Customization Options

Update Mechanics

Clawdbot Core

The skill auto-detects your installation method:

# npm global install
npm update -g clawdbot@latest
 
# pnpm global install
pnpm update -g clawdbot@latest
 
# bun global install
bun update -g clawdbot@latest
 
# Source (git) install
clawdbot update
 
# Always run after update:
clawdbot doctor --yes

Skill Updates

clawdhub update --all

This checks every installed skill against the registry and applies available updates. The session is isolated — it doesn't interfere with any active Clawdbot sessions you have open.

Verify and Manage

# Confirm the cron job was created
clawdbot cron list
 
# Preview what would update without applying
clawdhub update --all --dry-run
 
# Check current skill versions
clawdhub list
 
# Check Clawdbot version
clawdbot --version
 
# Disable auto-updates
clawdbot cron remove "Daily Auto-Update"
 
# Temporarily disable in config
# Set "cron": {"enabled": false} in clawdbot config

Troubleshooting

Updates not running?

1. Check clawdbot cron list — confirm the job exists
2. Verify the Gateway service is running continuously (cron requires it)
3. Ensure the Gateway user has write permissions to skill directories

Permission errors during update? This is common with system-level npm installs. Running the Gateway with appropriate permissions or switching to a user-level install usually resolves it.

Network errors? The update summary will include the error. It's safe to retry manually: clawdhub update --all

Considerations

• macOS and Linux only — not currently supported on Windows
• Requires Gateway to run continuously — the cron system depends on the Gateway being always-on; this works naturally for server/homelab setups but may not trigger for laptops that sleep
• Isolated session — updates run in their own context (cron:<jobId> agent), so there's no risk of disrupting an active Clawdbot conversation; run history is stored at ~/.openclaw/cron/runs/<jobId>.jsonl
• Breaking changes — if a skill update introduces a breaking change, you'll see it in the summary; you can pin a skill to a version manually if needed
• Security trade-off — automatically applying unreviewed updates to AI skills carries inherent trust risk. The broader community has discussed this: if a skill is compromised between versions, auto-updater will apply the malicious update without inspection. For high-security environments, consider using --dry-run first or reviewing changelogs before applying

The Bigger Picture

The Auto-Updater Skill embodies a shift in how we think about AI tooling maintenance: it should be invisible. Just as your IDE extensions auto-update in the background, your Clawdbot ecosystem should stay current without requiring your attention. With 14,000+ downloads and 88 stars, the community has clearly voted — this is table-stakes infrastructure for anyone running Clawdbot seriously.

View the skill on ClawHub: auto-updater