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Why

  • Only one gateway process should own a given config + port on a host; run additional gateways with isolated profiles and unique ports.
  • Survive crashes/SIGKILL without leaving stale lock files behind.
  • Fail fast with a clear error when another gateway already owns the port.

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Two layers

Startup enforces single-instance ownership in two independent steps, in order:
  1. File lock acquires a per-config lock file under the state lock directory. As part of acquiring it, startup probes the configured port for a live listener to detect a stale (crashed) lock owner.
  2. Socket bind binds the HTTP/WebSocket listener (default ws://127.0.0.1:18789) as an exclusive TCP listener.
Each layer can fail independently and throws its own GatewayLockError.

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File lock

  • If the lock file is missing, the recorded owner process is gone, or the owner’s port probe shows no live listener, startup reclaims the lock and continues.
  • If the lock is actively held and none of the above apply, startup retries for up to 5 seconds (default) before giving up: 
    GatewayLockError("gateway already running (pid <pid>); lock timeout after <ms>ms")

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Socket bind

  • On EADDRINUSE, startup retries the bind for up to 20 attempts at 500ms intervals (roughly 10 seconds total) to ride out a TIME_WAIT window after a recently exited process.
  • If the port is still in use after retries: 
    GatewayLockError("another gateway instance is already listening on ws://127.0.0.1:<port>")
  • Other bind failures: 
    GatewayLockError("failed to bind gateway socket on ws://127.0.0.1:<port>: <cause>")
On shutdown, the gateway closes the HTTP/WebSocket server and removes the lock file.

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Operational notes

  • If the port is occupied by a different, non-gateway process, the error is the same; free the port or choose another with openclaw gateway --port <port>.
  • Under a service supervisor, a new gateway process that hits either error above first probes /healthz on the existing process. If that process is healthy, the new process leaves it in control instead of failing. On systemd, it exits with code 78; the unit’s RestartPreventExitStatus=78 stops Restart=always from looping on a lock or EADDRINUSE conflict. If the existing process never becomes healthy, the health-probe retry is time-bounded and startup then fails with the lock error above instead of looping forever.
  • The macOS app keeps its own lightweight PID guard before spawning the gateway; the file lock and socket bind above are the actual runtime enforcement.