OpenClaw Installation on MacBook Pro Using Local Homebrew and NVM

A developer documented their successful OpenClaw installation on a MacBook Pro using a non-admin user account, relying on Gemini for guidance through the process.

Installation Approach

The installation used a local Homebrew setup in ~/homebrew to avoid requiring system administration privileges. Xcode Command Line Tools were pre-installed under an admin account, while OpenClaw, oMLX, and dependencies were installed under a standard user account.

Key Setup Steps

The process followed these specific instructions generated by Gemini:

Step 1: Initialize Local Homebrew & NVM

mkdir -p ~/homebrew
curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C ~/homebrew
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.4/install.sh | bash

Step 2: Configure Shell Environment

The ~/.zshrc file was modified to include:

# 1. HOMEBREW CONFIG (Local to oc1)
export PATH="/Users/oc1/homebrew/bin:$PATH"
export HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/Users/oc1/homebrew"
export HOMEBREW_CELLAR="/Users/oc1/homebrew/Cellar"
export HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY="/Users/oc1/homebrew"
# Compiler flags for local libraries (Required for M3 Max builds)
export LDFLAGS="-L$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/include"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig"
# 2. NVM CONFIG
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
# 3. PYENV CONFIG
export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
[[ -d $PYENV_ROOT/bin ]] && export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"

Step 3: Install Build Dependencies & pyenv

~/homebrew/bin/brew install --build-from-source openssl readline sqlite3 xz zlib
~/homebrew/bin/brew install --build-from-source pyenv

Step 4: Install Node and Python Runtimes

nvm install 24
nvm alias default 24
LDFLAGS="-L/Users/oc1/homebrew/lib" CPPFLAGS="-I/Users/oc1/homebrew/include" pyenv install 3.14.3
pyenv global 3.14.3

Step 5: Install OpenClaw

npm install -g pnpm
npm install -g openclaw@latest
openclaw --version

Additional Components

oMLX was installed via DMG file download, with the Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-MLX-vision-4.7-bit LLM downloaded through oMLX. The installation was performed on an M3 Max MacBook Pro, with compiler flags specifically configured for ARM64-optimized builds.