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$ curl repovive.com/roadmaps/openclaw/setting-up-your-ai-assistant/the-gateway-daemon-windows-wsl2

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$ curl repovive.com/roadmaps/openclaw/setting-up-your-ai-assistant/the-gateway-daemon-windows-wsl2

Repovive

The Gateway Daemon: Windows (WSL2) - Setting Up Your AI Assistant | OpenClaw | Repovive

Repovive.

The Gateway Daemon: Windows (WSL2)

Windows WSL2 setup

4 min

OpenClaw doesn't run natively on Windows. You need WSL $2$ 2 with an Ubuntu distribution.

Open PowerShell as Administrator and run:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu

Once Ubuntu is set up, install Node.js $22$ 22+ inside WSL and follow the Linux instructions from the previous unit. Modern WSL $2$ 2 ships with systemd enabled by default, so systemctl --user commands work out of the box.

If systemd is missing, add [boot] systemd=true to /etc/wsl.conf inside your distro, then restart WSL with wsl --shutdown from PowerShell. Can you see why this matters? Without systemd, you'd have no way to auto-start the daemon.