Installation

Requirements

Dependency	Version
OpenClaw	v2026.4+
Node.js	18+ (Node 24/26 fully supported)
Qdrant	Running on :6333
LLM access	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (default), or any OpenAI-compatible provider — see LLM provider

Qdrant can be started via Docker:

docker run -p 6333:6333 qdrant/qdrant

---

Install the plugin

# From npm (recommended)
openclaw plugins install openclaw-amem

# From a local checkout of the amem monorepo
pnpm --filter openclaw-amem build
openclaw plugins install --link ./packages/openclaw-amem

---

Configure openclaw.json

Add openclaw-amem to your plugin config and hook it into the memory slot:

{
  "plugins": {
    "allow": ["openclaw-amem"],
    "entries": {
      "openclaw-amem": {
        "enabled": true,
        "hooks": {
          "allowConversationAccess": true
        },
        "config": {
          "agentId": "main",
          "topK": 5
        }
      }
    },
    "slots": {
      "memory": "openclaw-amem"
    }
  }
}

Memory slot conflict

If your openclaw.json already has a memory slot assigned to another plugin (e.g. memory-core), you must replace it with openclaw-amem. The gateway only loads one plugin per slot — a second memory-kind plugin is silently skipped with no log output.

// ❌ Will cause amem to be silently ignored
"slots": {
  "memory": "memory-core"
}

// ✅ Correct — amem replaces memory-core
"slots": {
  "memory": "openclaw-amem"
}

If you were previously using memory-core, you can safely remove or disable it in plugins.entries:

"entries": {
  "memory-core": { "enabled": false },
  "openclaw-amem": {
    "enabled": true,
    "hooks": { "allowConversationAccess": true },
    "config": { "agentId": "main", "topK": 5 }
  }
}

Required: hooks.allowConversationAccess: true must be set explicitly. Without it, the agent_end hook is blocked by OpenClaw's security policy and automatic memory write-back will not work — memories will only be written when you call memory_add manually.

If allowConversationAccess is not set, the plugin will log a warning after 10 minutes of startup and append a notice to every memory_search result indicating that write-back is disabled (Story 34).

---

Restart OpenClaw

openclaw gateway restart

On first run, the plugin downloads the multilingual-e5-small ONNX embedding model (~120MB) and caches it locally. Subsequent restarts are instant.

---

LLM provider

The engine calls an LLM for note construction, linking, and evolution. Choose the backend with AMEM_LLM_PROVIDER:

• anthropic (default) — the Anthropic Messages API. Set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
• openai — the OpenAI Chat Completions API, which every OpenAI-compatible endpoint speaks. Set AMEM_LLM_PROVIDER=openai, point AMEM_LLM_BASE_URL at the endpoint, and set AMEM_LLM_API_KEY (or the standard OPENAI_API_KEY). This covers OpenAI, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Groq, Together, and local servers (Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio — no key needed).

# DeepSeek
AMEM_LLM_PROVIDER=openai AMEM_LLM_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com/v1 \
AMEM_LLM_API_KEY=sk-... AMEM_LLM_MODEL=deepseek-chat

# Local Ollama (keyless)
AMEM_LLM_PROVIDER=openai AMEM_LLM_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1 \
AMEM_LLM_MODEL=qwen2.5

Full env-var reference and model recommendations: Configuration →.