Back to Blog
•2 min read•By Versatly

ClawVault v1.8.2: OpenClaw Compatibility and Path Safety

ClawVault v1.8.2 improves OpenClaw compatibility, validates custom paths safely, and keeps AI agent memory reliable so deployments stay stable in production.

Updated

We're excited to announce ClawVault v1.8.2, focusing on OpenClaw compatibility and reliability improvements based on community feedback and automated code review.

What's New

OpenClaw v2026.2.9 Compatibility

ClawVault is now fully tested and verified against OpenClaw's latest release. Key compatibility notes:

  • Hook system working — ClawVault's lifecycle hooks (gateway:startup, command:new, session:start) are fully operational after OpenClaw's tsdown migration fix
  • Post-compaction benefits — Session transcripts now maintain proper parentId chains, improving session-recap reliability
  • Memory improvements — Benefits from OpenClaw's Voyage embeddings and QMD cache optimizations

OPENCLAW_HOME & OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR Support

For users with custom OpenClaw installations, ClawVault now respects environment variable overrides:

# Custom OpenClaw home directory
export OPENCLAW_HOME=/custom/path/.openclaw

# Custom state directory (overrides OPENCLAW_HOME for agent data)
export OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR=/var/lib/openclaw

This enables multi-user deployments, containerized environments, and custom storage locations.

Robust Path Validation

v1.8.2 adds strict validation for environment variable paths:

  • Whitespace trimmed — Leading/trailing spaces are removed
  • Empty strings ignored — Falls back to default paths
  • Absolute paths required — Relative paths are ignored to prevent cwd-dependent behavior
  • Graceful error handling — listAgents() now handles malformed filesystem state without crashing

Stress Test Results

All 15 core commands passed our automated stress test:

| Command | Status | |---------|--------| | wake | ✅ Context death detection | | checkpoint | ✅ State saved correctly | | search | ✅ Keyword search | | vsearch | ✅ Semantic search | | capture | ✅ Inbox notes + indexing | | session-recap | ✅ Transcript retrieval | | repair-session | ✅ Corruption detection | | handoff / sleep | ✅ Session continuity |

Installation

# Update via npm
npm update -g clawvault

# Or install fresh
npm install -g clawvault

# For OpenClaw agents
clawhub update clawvault

Links

An elephant never forgets. 🐘

Continue reading

The Session That Was Never Observed: Building Active Memory for AI Agents

How we built ClawVault's Active Session Observer — threshold scaling, byte cursors, and the 14MB session that exposed a blind spot in our memory architecture.

CrewAI Memory vs ClawVault: Framework-Locked or Framework-Free?

Compare CrewAI memory (short-term, long-term, entity) with ClawVault's framework-agnostic persistent memory for AI agents.