Headless OpenClaw Setup with Discord via Docker Scripts

A developer has shared scripts on GitHub to set up OpenClaw with Discord in a headless Docker environment, specifically designed to work without the TUI or WebUI interfaces, which can be problematic with screen readers.

Key Details

The repository at https://github.com/chigkim/easyclaw includes a Docker image (ghcr.io/openclaw/openclaw:latest) and a management script called claw. The script supports commands: claw [init|config|log|start|stop|restart|build|update|run|dashboard].

OpenClaw runs inside a container isolated from the host, with the ~/.openclaw folder mounted on the host for persistent assets. A dashboard is accessible from outside the container.

The setup is preconfigured with OpenAI Responses API to run with various engines/model setups. It includes:

• Chromium browser inside the container for the agent
• MarkItDown MCP for agents to convert various files to markdown
• Playwright for Node.js
• UV for Python
• FFmpeg

Setup Steps

First, fill out claw.toml with configuration like this:

[models.providers.oai]
baseUrl = "http://localhost:8080/v1"
apiKey = "api-key"
[[models.providers.oai.models]]
id = "qwen3.5-35b-a3b-q8_0"
name = "qwen3.5-35b"
input = ["text", "image"]
contextWindow = 32768
maxTokens = 8192

[agents.defaults]
timeoutSeconds = 600
maxConcurrent = 1
[agents.defaults.subagents]
maxConcurrent = 1
[channels.discord]
token = "DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN"
server_id = "1234"

Then run claw init . to initialize. If the bot is properly configured on your Discord server, you can interact with it on the server. The author notes it has "pretty relaxed rules for Discord, so make your bot private!"