6 replies

Installed skills are not loaded — skills.watcher disabled (Tool not found)

Hi everyone

I’m running into an issue with OpenClaw skills not being loaded, and after deep investigation I believe we’ve identified the exact root cause — but can’t apply the fix ourselves due to managed hosting limitations.

Problem:

• We install skills via

clawhub install google-calendar

clawhub install google-calendar

• Installation succeeds, skill appears on disk (

workspace/skills/...

workspace/skills/...

)
• However, when the assistant tries to use any tool from the skill (e.g.

google_calendar_list_events

google_calendar_list_events

), we always get:

Tool not found

Tool not found

• This happens for all installed skills
• Built-in skills work fine

Key finding (confirmed):

We found this GitHub issue:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/17417

In that thread, the root cause was clearly identified:

Logs contained

Skills watcher disabled

Skills watcher disabled

Config parameter

skills.watcher.enabled

skills.watcher.enabled

was set to

false

false

by default
After setting it to

true

true

and restarting OpenClaw, local skills loaded correctly

This perfectly matches our symptoms.

Our situation:

• OpenClaw is deployed on a managed hosting (realway.com)
• We do NOT have direct access to

openclaw.json

openclaw.json

or service-level configs
• We attempted to enable the watcher programmatically via:

{
  "skills": {
    "watcher": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

{
  "skills": {
    "watcher": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

(using

gateway config.patch

gateway config.patch

)

• The platform rejected this with

invalid config

invalid config

Questions:
1. Is

skills.watcher.enabled=false

skills.watcher.enabled=false

expected default behavior in some deployments?
2. Are there alternative ways to force-enable the skills watcher (env vars, flags, CLI)?
3. In managed environments — is this something only the hosting provider can change?
4. Is there any workaround to trigger skills loading without the watcher?

At this point, everything points to the watcher being disabled at the platform level.

Any confirmation, advice, or additional context from maintainers or experienced users would be hugely appreciated

Thanks!

FotC�

Friends of the Crustacean 🦞🤝•2w ago•

6 replies

Nikita Emelin

Installed skills are not loaded — skills.watcher disabled (Tool not found)

Hi everyone

clawhub install google-calendar

clawhub install google-calendar

• Installation succeeds, skill appears on disk (

workspace/skills/...

workspace/skills/...

)
• However, when the assistant tries to use any tool from the skill (e.g.

google_calendar_list_events

google_calendar_list_events

), we always get:

Tool not found

Tool not found

Skills watcher disabled

Skills watcher disabled

Config parameter

skills.watcher.enabled

skills.watcher.enabled

was set to

false

false

by default
After setting it to

true

true

openclaw.json

openclaw.json

or service-level configs
• We attempted to enable the watcher programmatically via:

{
  "skills": {
    "watcher": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

{
  "skills": {
    "watcher": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

(using

gateway config.patch

gateway config.patch

)

• The platform rejected this with

invalid config

invalid config

Questions:
1. Is

skills.watcher.enabled=false

skills.watcher.enabled=false

Thanks!

Installed skills are not loaded — skills.watcher disabled (Tool not found)

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