+
Telegram (Part 3) gave your agent a bot. WhatsApp gives it a phone line — the app ~3 billion people already use, reachable with zero friction. One catch worth understanding up front: WhatsApp has no bot account, so OpenClaw links to a real number as a companion device (like WhatsApp Web) and the agent acts as that account. Every command and error below is from a real run.
+Through Parts 1–4 you deployed OpenClaw, secured it with HTTPS, added Telegram, and made it private over a NetBird mesh — all pointed at OpenAI. This part swaps the model out from under it: point the same agent at WEC Models — WiLine's own OpenAI-compatible inference — and run it on an open-weight model, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct. Same box, no rebuild — just a base-URL, key, and model change via the OpenClaw CLI.
+
In Article 2 we put Caddy in front of
OpenClaw for HTTPS, and in Article 3
we added a Telegram channel. The gateway works — but Caddy is still listening on
0.0.0.0, reachable by anything that can route to the box. This is the capstone
of the series: we join the server and your laptop to a NetBird mesh,
repoint openclaw.local at the mesh IP, and close the public ports. The same
https://openclaw.local/chat URL keeps working — but only for your devices.
Every command and error below is from the actual run.
+You've deployed OpenClaw and secured it behind HTTPS. Now make it usable — talk to your agent from your phone via Telegram. We create a bot, connect it, clear OpenClaw's pairing gate, and get a real reply. Every command and gotcha below is from an actual run.
+In Article 1 we got OpenClaw running —
but only over plain HTTP, with an allowInsecureAuth workaround. Here we put
Caddy in front of it as a reverse proxy: real HTTPS,
device-paired auth, and the gateway's raw ports closed so the proxy is the only
way in. Every command and error below is from the actual deploy.
++Your AI assistant doesn't have to live in someone else's cloud.
Deploy a self-hosted OpenClaw AI agent on a WEC Instance with Docker Compose — from spinning up the VM to an agent that actually answers, using your own model API key. Every command, version, and error below was captured from a real deployment on a WEC Instance.