OpenClaw + OpenViking Context-Engine Plugin

Use OpenViking as the long-term memory backend for OpenClaw. In OpenClaw, this plugin is registered as the openviking context engine.

This document is not an installation guide. It is an implementation-focused design note for integrators and engineers. It describes how the plugin works today based on the code under examples/openclaw-plugin, not a future refactor target.

Documentation

• Install and upgrade: INSTALL.md
• Chinese design and install guide: INSTALL-ZH.md
• Agent-oriented operator guide: INSTALL-AGENT.md

Design Positioning

• OpenClaw still owns the agent runtime, prompt orchestration, and tool execution.
• OpenViking owns long-term memory retrieval, session archiving, archive summaries, and memory extraction.
• examples/openclaw-plugin is not a narrow "memory lookup" plugin. It is an integration layer that spans the OpenClaw lifecycle.

In the current implementation, the plugin plays four roles at once:

• context-engine: implements assemble, afterTurn, and compact
• hook layer: handles before_prompt_build, session_start, session_end, agent_end, and before_reset
• tool provider: registers memory/archive tools plus OpenViking resource and skill import tools
• runtime manager: connects to and monitors a remote OpenViking service

Overall Architecture

The diagram above reflects the current implementation boundary:

• OpenClaw remains the primary runtime on the left. The plugin does not take over agent execution.
• The middle layer combines hooks, the context engine, tools, and runtime management in one plugin registration.
• All HTTP traffic goes through OpenVikingClient, which centralizes X-OpenViking-* headers and routing logs.
• The OpenViking service owns sessions, memories, archives, and Phase 2 extraction, with storage under viking://user/*, viking://agent/*, and viking://session/*.

That split lets OpenClaw stay focused on reasoning and orchestration while OpenViking becomes the source of truth for long-lived context.

Identity and Routing

The plugin does not send one fixed agent ID to OpenViking. It tries to keep OpenClaw session identity and OpenViking routing aligned.

The main rules are:

• reuse sessionId directly when it is already a UUID
• prefer sessionKey when deriving a stable ovSessionId
• normalize unsafe path characters, or fall back to a stable SHA-256 when needed
• resolve X-OpenViking-Agent per session, not per process
• when plugins.entries.openviking.config.agent_prefix is non-empty, prefix the session agent as <agent_prefix>_<sessionAgent>
• when OpenClaw does not provide a session agent, use its default agent main
• send X-OpenViking-Agent on OpenViking requests, including startup health checks
• only add X-OpenViking-Account / X-OpenViking-User when accountId / userId are explicitly configured

This matters because the plugin is built to support multi-agent and multi-session OpenClaw usage without mixing memories across sessions.

The recommended remote-mode configuration only needs:

• baseUrl
• apiKey
• agent_prefix

In this setup:

• apiKey should usually be a user key
• accountId / userId are advanced options only when the deployment needs explicit identity headers, such as root-key or trusted-server flows
• isolateUserScopeByAgent / isolateAgentScopeByUser must match the server-side account namespace policy when using the PR #1356 canonical namespace model
• agentScopeMode is a deprecated compatibility alias for older hash-based routing and should only be used against older servers

Canonical namespace policy

For OpenViking servers that include PR #1356, the plugin no longer treats agent or user scope as a locally computed hash. Instead it expands shorthand aliases into canonical URIs using the configured namespace policy:

• viking://user/memories
  • viking://user/<user_id>/memories when isolateUserScopeByAgent=false
  • viking://user/<user_id>/agent/<agent_id>/memories when isolateUserScopeByAgent=true
• viking://agent/memories
  • viking://agent/<agent_id>/memories when isolateAgentScopeByUser=false
  • viking://agent/<agent_id>/user/<user_id>/memories when isolateAgentScopeByUser=true

The plugin cannot auto-discover this policy today because /api/v1/system/status does not expose it. Configure the two booleans explicitly so they stay aligned with the server-side account policy.

Prompt-Front Recall Flow

Today the main recall path still lives in before_prompt_build:

1. Extract the latest user text from messages or prompt.
2. Resolve the agent routing for the current sessionId/sessionKey.
3. Run a quick availability precheck so prompt building does not stall when OpenViking is unavailable.
4. Query both viking://user/memories and viking://agent/memories in parallel.
5. Deduplicate, threshold-filter, rerank, and trim the results under a token budget.
6. Prepend the selected memories as a <relevant-memories> block.

The reranking logic is not pure vector-score sorting. The current implementation also considers:

• whether a result is a leaf memory with level == 2
• whether it looks like a preference memory
• whether it looks like an event memory
• lexical overlap with the current query

Session Lifecycle

Session handling is the main axis of this design. In the current implementation it covers history assembly, incremental append, asynchronous commit, and blocking compaction readback.

What assemble() does

assemble() is not just replaying old chat history. It reads session context back from OpenViking under a token budget, then rebuilds OpenClaw-facing messages:

• latest_archive_overview becomes [Session History Summary]
• pre_archive_abstracts becomes [Archive Index]
• active session messages stay in message-block form
• assistant tool parts become toolCall (input compatible: toolUse/input is normalized to toolCall/arguments)
• tool output becomes separate toolResult
• the final message list goes through a tool-use/result pairing repair pass

That means OpenClaw sees "compressed history summary + archive index + active messages", not an ever-growing raw transcript.

What afterTurn() does

afterTurn() has a narrower job: append only the new turn into the OpenViking session.

• it slices only the newly added messages
• it keeps only user / assistant capture text
• it preserves toolCall / toolResult content in the serialized turn text
• it strips injected <relevant-memories> blocks and metadata noise before capture
• it appends the sanitized turn text into the OpenViking session

After that, the plugin checks pending_tokens. Once the session crosses commitTokenThreshold, it triggers commit(wait=false):

• archive generation and Phase 2 memory extraction continue asynchronously on the server
• the current turn is not blocked waiting for extraction
• if logFindRequests is enabled, the logs include the task id and follow-up extraction detail

What compact() does

compact() is the stricter synchronous boundary:

• it calls commit(wait=true) and blocks for completion
• when an archive exists, it re-reads latest_archive_overview
• it returns updated token estimates, the latest archive id, and summary content
• if the summary is too coarse, the model can call ov_archive_expand to reopen a specific archive

So afterTurn() is closer to "incremental append plus threshold-triggered async commit", while compact() is the explicit "wait for archive and compaction to finish" boundary.

Tools and Expandability

Beyond automatic behavior, the plugin exposes six tools directly:

• memory_recall: explicit long-term memory search
• memory_store: write text into an OpenViking session and trigger commit
• memory_forget: delete by URI, or search first and remove a single strong match
• ov_archive_expand: expand a concrete archive back into raw messages
• ov_import: import a resource or skill; defaults to resource and uses kind: "skill" for skills
• ov_search: search OpenViking resources and skills, especially after importing them

They serve different roles:

• automatic recall covers the default case where the model does not know what to search yet
• memory_recall gives the model an explicit follow-up search path
• memory_store is for immediately persisting clearly important information
• ov_archive_expand is the "go back to archive detail" escape hatch when summaries are not enough
• ov_import lets the agent complete explicit import requests without asking the user to remember slash commands
• ov_search closes the loop after import by letting the user or agent confirm and consume resources and skills

ov_archive_expand is especially important because assemble() normally returns archive summaries and indexes, not the full raw transcript.

Resource and Skill Import

Resource and skill imports are intentionally separate because they land in different OpenViking namespaces and use different server APIs:

• resources go through /api/v1/resources and land under viking://resources/...
• skills go through /api/v1/skills and land under viking://agent/skills/...

The plugin also registers explicit slash commands for manual imports:

/ov-import ./README.md --to viking://resources/openviking-readme --wait
/ov-import ./skills/install-openviking-memory --kind skill --wait
/ov-search "OpenViking install" --uri viking://resources/openviking-readme
/ov-search "memory install skill" --uri viking://agent/skills

Resource import supports remote URLs, Git URLs, local files, local directories, and uploaded zip files. OpenViking's built-in parsers cover common documents and media such as Markdown, text, PDF, HTML, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB, images, audio, and video. Directory imports also accept common code, documentation, and config file extensions such as .py, .js, .ts, .go, .rs, .java, .cpp, .json, .yaml, .toml, .csv, .rst, .proto, .tf, and .vue.

For HTTP safety, the plugin never sends a direct local filesystem path to the OpenViking server. Local files and directories are first uploaded through /api/v1/resources/temp_upload; directories are zipped locally with a pure JavaScript zip implementation before upload.

Runtime Mode

The plugin operates exclusively in remote mode as a pure HTTP client:

• baseUrl and optional apiKey come from plugin config
• no local subprocess is started or managed
• session context, memory find/read, commit, and archive expansion behavior stays the same

The OpenViking service must be deployed and running independently before the plugin can connect to it.

Relationship to the Older Design Draft

The repo also contains a more future-looking design draft at docs/design/openclaw-context-engine-refactor.md. It is important not to conflate the two:

• this README describes current implemented behavior
• the older draft discusses a stronger future move into context-engine-owned lifecycle control
• in the current version, the main automatic recall path still lives in before_prompt_build, not fully in assemble()
• in the current version, afterTurn() already appends to the OpenViking session, but commit remains threshold-triggered and asynchronous on that path
• in the current version, compact() already uses commit(wait=true), but it is still focused on synchronous commit plus readback rather than owning every orchestration concern

That distinction matters, otherwise the future design draft is easy to misread as already shipped behavior.

Operator and Debugging Surfaces

If you need to debug this plugin, start with these entry points.

Inspect the current setup

ov-install --current-version
openclaw config get plugins.entries.openviking.config
openclaw config get plugins.slots.contextEngine

Watch logs

OpenClaw plugin logs:

openclaw logs --follow

OpenViking service logs:

cat ~/.openviking/data/log/openviking.log

Web Console

python -m openviking.console.bootstrap --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8020 --openviking-url http://127.0.0.1:1933

ov tui

ov tui

Common things to check

For installation, upgrade, and uninstall operations, use INSTALL.md.