Before you start, make sure you have the following in place. The Hostinger VPS plan, root SSH access, and the OpenClaw template deployed from the Hostinger marketplace are the only hard requirements.

After deployment you might try running openclaw directly in your SSH session and get this:

This is expected. The Hostinger template runs OpenClaw entirely inside a Docker container. The binary is not installed on the host OS. It lives inside the container image. Your PATH will never find it from the host shell.

All docker compose commands must be run from the directory that contains the docker-compose.yml file. If you run them from anywhere else you'll get this error:

Locate the file with:

You should see something like /docker/openclaw-qrjy/docker-compose.yml. The suffix (e.g. qrjy) is random and will differ per deployment. Navigate into that directory:

From inside the project directory, check the container status:

A healthy deployment looks like this:

If the container is not running, start it with:

Every openclaw CLI call must be prefixed withdocker compose exec openclaw. The pattern is:

Common commands

Interactive shell

If you need to run several commands in a row, open a shell directly inside the container. From there you can call openclaw without any prefix.

When a user tries to connect their Telegram account to your OpenClaw instance, the connection sits in a pending queue until the server owner approves it. The user will see a message like:

On the server, check what's waiting:

You'll see a pairing code. Approve it with:

After approval, the user should reopen the Telegram chat. The bot will start responding immediately. You can confirm the gateway is healthy with:

Typing docker compose exec openclaw openclaw every time gets old fast. Add a shell alias so you can call openclaw from anywhere on the host:

Apply it immediately:

Now openclaw gateway status works from any directory on the host, just like a native install.

A cheat sheet for the most common container operations. Always run these from /docker/openclaw-qrjy (or wherever your compose file lives).