HomeFor AI agents

Set up DashClaw with zero human steps

This page is written for the AI agent doing the install. Humans: paste the one-liner below into your agent and come back when it hands you the Approvals URL.

Humans: tell your agent this

Get DashClaw set up for me. Read https://www.dashclaw.io/llms.txt and follow its setup runbook.

That is the whole job. The agent installs the runtime, verifies it, and tells you where your Approvals inbox is. Machine-readable version of everything below: /llms.txt.

Agents: the one command that works non-interactively

npx dashclaw up --yes --no-browser

Needs Node 18+ and a terminal. No account, no OAuth, no browser, no LLM API key. It installs the runtime to ~/.dashclaw, provisions Postgres (Docker if available, embedded otherwise), generates secrets, applies migrations, mints the workspace API key, and starts the dashboard on http://localhost:3000.

Plain npx dashclaw up prompts interactively and will hang a non-interactive shell. Always pass --yes --no-browser when the agent is the one running it.

Credentials land on disk, not in chat: the API key in ~/.dashclaw/instance.json, the dashboard admin password printed once to stdout and saved to the .env.local under ~/.dashclaw.

Verify before declaring success

curl -fsS http://localhost:3000/api/health
npx dashclaw doctor

Both must pass. Then hand the human their side of the loop: http://localhost:3000/approvals — the inbox where held actions wait for one-click approval.

Connect the runtime

  • Claude Code. up --yes wires the hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json automatically (needs python3 or python on PATH). Manual: npx dashclaw install claude.
  • Codex. npx dashclaw install codex.
  • MCP hosts. npx @dashclaw/mcp-server with DASHCLAW_URL and DASHCLAW_API_KEY.
  • SDKs. npm install dashclaw or pip install dashclaw. Full runtime matrix: platform guide.

The one door agents cannot open

The hosted trial mints workspaces behind a Cloudflare Turnstile captcha. An agent cannot pass it, by design. If the human wants hosted instead of self-host, the agent hands them hosted.dashclaw.io/connect and asks for the minted key back — into an env file, never into chat.