Source - Session Management (OpenClaw Docs)

Origin: https://docs.openclaw.ai/concepts/session
Fetched: 2026-04-15

Summary

OpenClaw sessions organize conversations across channels. The Gateway owns all session state; routing scope, isolation policy, lifecycle, and cleanup are each configurable independently.

Key Points

• Routing: DMs share one session by default; group chats, rooms, cron jobs, and webhooks each get their own isolated session
• DM isolation: session.dmScope — main (default) | per-peer | per-channel-peer (recommended) | per-account-channel-peer
• Lifecycle: daily reset at 4:00 AM; idle reset via session.reset.idleMinutes; manual /new or /reset; /new <model> also switches active model
• Storage: ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/ — sessions.json (metadata) + <sessionId>.jsonl (transcripts)
• Maintenance: session.maintenance.mode (warn default → enforce); pruneAfter 30d; maxEntries 500
• CLI: openclaw sessions cleanup --dry-run, openclaw sessions --json, openclaw status
• In-chat: /status (context usage + model), /context list (system prompt)

Linked Wiki Pages

• Session Management (OpenClaw) — full concept page