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How a client bootstraps a session list in one call, the common gateway event families, and the node helper and exec lifecycle contracts.

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Session list bootstrap

Call sessions.subscribe with a non-empty sessions.list parameter object, such as { limit: 60, ownerFirst: true }, to subscribe and load the initial roster in one request. A successful WebSocket response has the payload { subscribed: true, list }, where list is the normal SessionsListResult. Calling with {} preserves the acknowledgment-only response { subscribed: true } and does not read a snapshot. List parameters select the snapshot; they do not filter the connection’s session event subscription. The Gateway registers the subscription before projecting the list. Clients must listen for sessions.changed before making the request: events can arrive while the snapshot is being built. Reconcile those events with the response and issue a trailing sessions.list refresh when needed, including when an event only invalidates the cached list. Reconnects require a new subscription and snapshot. The Gateway keeps durable session metadata in memory and fills materialized rows incrementally. Committed owner changes refresh affected rows; there is no completed-page cache or one-second staleness window. Keyed descriptions, resolution, and chat startup prepare their requested row without waiting for the bulk refresh. Newly admitted or replaced stores load their metadata once, and rows disappear when their store leaves the current topology. Each response applies the current viewer’s visibility and current activity time. Resident rows use stored titles and usage. Optional message previews and terminal fallback-model metadata fill in through bounded read-only background transcript reads; they can be absent from an early response. Foreground requests take priority. These reads do not restore cold archives, parse oversized messages, call a model, or change stored metadata or session activity ordering. Missing historical titles and legacy ACP keys are repaired only by openclaw doctor --fix. Missing usage remains absent until the normal usage writer records it. Both methods accept activeOnly: true to select currently running or queued sessions before pagination. Activity comes from the live runtime owners, not a stored status flag. Ordinary listing behavior is unchanged when the option is omitted or false. Active-only results include each visible agent-owned global and unknown session with its raw key and captured agentId; callers identify rows by agent, key, and sessionId together. Literal agent:<id>:global and agent:<id>:unknown sessions remain different rows. Active-only raw sentinel rows omit the optional childSessions and hasActiveSubagentRun fields; use hasActiveRun for direct activity. Normal permissions, archive/inclusion filters, and page limits still apply. Sessionless/internal runs are outside the session index. Both methods accept ownerFirst: true to prepend up to 60 matching viewer-owned rows (or limit, when smaller) to the normal first page, deduplicated by session key. This applies only when offset is zero or omitted; later pages use normal pagination. Owned rows must pass the same visibility and list filters as the shared page. The Gateway resolves the viewer from the authenticated connection; no client-supplied identity selects these rows. Without an authenticated viewer identity, or when ownerFirst is false or omitted, the list uses normal ordering. The shared page still determines limitApplied, offset, nextOffset, hasMore, and totalCount. Prepended rows can make sessions.length and count exceed the shared page size. Use nextOffset to advance and deduplicate rows by session key across pages; do not derive the next offset from the displayed row count.

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Common event families

  • chat: UI chat updates such as chat.inject and other transcript-only chat events. In protocol v4, delta payloads carry deltaText; message remains the cumulative assistant snapshot. Non-prefix replacements set replace=true and use deltaText as the replacement text. Failed runs (state: "error") may include errorDetail alongside the coarse errorKind and human-readable errorMessage. This closed object has seven optional fields: provider, model, failoverReason, providerRuntimeFailureKind, providerErrorType, httpStatus, and providerErrorMessagePreview. Strings are capped at 300 characters; httpStatus is an integer from 100 through 599. Details come from the failed attempt’s sanitized provider observation, not from reparsing the user-facing message. The preview is credential-redacted and may be shorter than the protocol cap. Raw bodies, raw previews, and diagnostic hashes are never included in errorDetail. Runs without provider observations omit it; successful and canceled events do not carry it. This is an additive protocol-v4 field.
  • session.message, session.operation, session.tool: transcript, in-flight session operation, and event-stream updates for a subscribed session.
  • session.approval: sanitized pending and terminal approval truth for an explicitly opted-in exact-session subscriber. Child approvals use the persisted ancestor audience; events never mutate transcripts or wake agents.
  • session.observer: safe live session headline and status digest. A model-authored preamble can update the headline immediately; utility-model assessments replace it later when available. Web, iOS, and Android use the same run-scoped digest. The optional sessionId and opaque lifecycleRevision identify the session lifecycle; lifecycleRevision can be absent before the first reset. Revisions increase across runs within that lifecycle but can restart after a reset. /clear preserves sessionId and changes lifecycleRevision. Clients show its headline or inspector link only while the digest’s exact runId is present in activeRunIds.
  • sessions.changed: session index or metadata changed. Keyed changes carry the affected row in session, presented for that connection. Nested rows in sessions.changed and session.message use the same full prepared metadata, viewer permissions, and clock as sessions.list with title, last-message, and activity-summary enrichment enabled. This adds catalog-backed fields such as thinking options and replaces legacy model aliases with canonical model IDs in event rows. The Control UI applies these rows locally to existing roster members, so their values match the list. A reason: "patch" event that commits a model, account, or runtime selection also carries catalogChanged: true; clients may treat other patches as session-only and keep cached catalogs. Top-level lifecycle and capacity fields remain event receipts, including explicit clearing values. When a nested row omits an optional field, honor its top-level clearing tombstone; nested values take precedence when present. Merge an existing roster member’s snapshot locally when the query’s membership and pagination window remain valid. The Control UI reuses lifecycle and ordinary patch, send, steer, agent.run.started, agent.input.settled, run-capacity, and chat.title snapshots for held rows with unchanged identity, archive, pin, owner, and parent facts and nondecreasing recency. Keyed sessions.changed and session.message publications also carry ancestorSessions, an array of refreshed full rows for the affected navigation, control, requester, and swarm ancestors. The projection walks existing parent references up to the roots, deduplicates physical row identities, and stops cycles. Each ancestor passes the same per-viewer visibility filter and presentation as sessions.list; invisible intermediates do not prevent delivery of visible ancestors above them. The array contains at most 64 ancestors. If an ancestor cannot be resolved or the traversal exceeds that bound, the field is omitted so clients retain authoritative refresh behavior. An empty array certifies that there are no visible ancestors. This is an additive protocol-v4 field; it does not change subscription scope or list membership. Clients apply the child and held ancestor rows together, honoring each row’s identity and clock. In these complete snapshots, omitted optional row facts clear previously held values, including child links, swarm summaries, and descendant-running flags. Non-null legacy top-level row fields do not fill omissions in a complete, viewer-filtered row. Explicit null clearing receipts and separate lifecycle receipts remain effective. The existing optional title/preview enrichment and thinking-metadata preservation rules still apply. The Control UI coalesces an authoritative refresh for missing rows or snapshots, broad/keyless changes, catalogChanged, membership filters, incomplete ancestor snapshots, and uncertain boundaries (including owner-first rows promoted into the shared page). Events overlapping a roster read retain a trailing refresh so its response cannot lose an update. A retained list with a read error also refreshes on the next relevant event. Profile identity, runner availability, and loaded cron bindings can produce broad invalidations. Activity-summary-only publications update opted-in Activity consumers; shared session and agent rosters do not refetch for those recap-only changes. Authorized incognito descriptions and events use the same row presentation from transient process-local state. Incognito rows remain excluded from the session roster, and queued events cannot cross a reset or database replacement. Tool/progress events keep delivering while rows refresh; their optional row metadata can be absent until ready. Full roster rows remain guaranteed on keyed sessions.changed and session.message snapshots. Active-run fields use the same aggregate and complete-exact semantics as sessions.list; activeRunIds: null clears cached exact identities to unavailable, omission leaves the cache unchanged, and an array replaces it. Delete notifications from sessions.delete and incognito reset carry the removed generation’s sessionId, without a current-row snapshot. Clients must not delete a replacement with a different ID. A key-only delete event or a rowless global notification invalidates the canonical session list; it does not identify the current generation as deleted.
  • presence: system presence snapshot updates.
  • tick: periodic keepalive/liveness event.
  • health: gateway health snapshot update.
  • heartbeat: heartbeat event stream update.
  • cron: cron run/job change event.
  • shutdown: gateway shutdown notification.
  • node.pair.requested / node.pair.resolved: node pairing lifecycle.
  • node.invoke.request: node invoke request broadcast.
  • device.pair.requested / device.pair.resolved: paired-device approval lifecycle.
  • device.pair.setup.completed: exact setup-code handoff completion, scoped to operator.pairing.
  • device.pair.setup.deliveryUncertain: replay-safe setup-code retirement whose credential response delivery could not be confirmed, scoped to operator.pairing.
  • voicewake.changed: wake-word trigger config changed.
  • plugins.changed: plugin runtime publication completed. The payload is { generation }; refresh plugins.list to reconcile installed and runtime state.
  • config.changed: a config write persisted (payload carries the config path, the new snapshot hash, and a timestamp — never config content). Operator-read scoped; clients refresh via config.get.
  • skills.changed: connectivity, the skill catalog, config, or eligibility changed after the gateway invalidated its skills snapshot. The payload’s reason is watch, watch-targets, manual, remote-node, config-change, or workshop. Operator-read scoped; clients refresh via skills.status.
  • exec.approval.requested / exec.approval.resolved: exec approval lifecycle.
  • plugin.approval.requested / plugin.approval.resolved: plugin approval lifecycle.

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Node helper methods

Nodes may call skills.bins to fetch the current list of skill executables for auto-allow checks.

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Node exec lifecycle events

Nodes report system.run lifecycle through the node-role node.event RPC with event: "exec.started", "exec.finished", or "exec.denied". These are not the operator exec.approval.* broadcasts and do not use the retired TCP bridge. The RPC accepts a JSON string in payloadJSON or an object in payload. A string payloadJSON takes precedence when both are supplied. For example:
Current headless nodes include sessionKey, runId, and host: "node". Additional fields are: Echo the correlation fields forwarded with system.run; neither an ID nor the payload’s host field grants authority. The Gateway matches the authenticated node and connection, run ID, and session key when the invocation binds one. Unmatched events return handled: false with reason: "unmatched_exec_event" and produce no system notification. A narrow legacy macOS-client path may match a missing or mismatched run ID only to one unambiguous invocation on that connection/session; new clients must send the issued run ID. exec.started retains the authorization record; exec.finished and exec.denied consume it before notification filtering. tools.exec.notifyOnExit: false or suppressNotifyOnExit: true suppresses notifications. Denied events never enqueue a system event or wake agent work. Finished events notify only for timeout, nonzero or unknown exit code, or nonempty compacted output; successful exit 0 with no output stays quiet. Finished notifications with a run ID are deduplicated by canonical session and run ID. A heartbeat wake is requested only after a system event is queued. Node event delivery is best-effort, not a durable completion ledger.