Nanobot: Install and Setup

In this article, I'm going to document settting up nanobot on my Macbook Air M5.

I have tried this setup both on:

• Debian 12 VM running on Mac using UTM.
• Macbook Pro Intel (2015) running MacOS Monterey

The instructions below cover both MacOS and Debian. Feel free to skip the parts that don't apply to your OS of choice.

Install and Setup Debian VM

• Install UTM on mac using brew: brew install --cask utm
• Download Debian 12 arm64 prebuilt VM (you will need to signup and/or login on archive.org to download)
• Unzip the downloaded file and double click on extracted file. It will load the image in UTM automatically.
• Boot into Debian VM (username and password is debian, change it using Debian Settings app).
• Disable suspend on Debian (as I have been unable to get VM out of suspended state using keyboard or mouse, and then I'm forced to do a forced poweroff of VM): 
  • Click the far upper right corner power button on Debian desktop.
  • Click the settings gearwheel in the resulting dropdown box.
  • Click "Power" in the left menu of the resulting popup settings window.
  • Under "Power Saving Options" select "Never" instead of "5 minutes". 
• Open Debian Settings app, search "Screen Settings" and disable blank screen also disable automatic screen lock.
• Optional: If you want dock/taskbar to show always: Open https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ on Debian browser and click "Install"
• To be able to pause VM and close UTM window: First shutdown VM. Then edit VM settings, under Display, change "Emulated Display Card" from virtio-gpu-gl-pci (GPU Supported) to virtio-gpu-pci. This should deselect GPU Acceleration Supported, which is needed to be able to pause the VM and close UTM window. 
  • To test that it is working, boot Debian VM, click "Pause" button in top left corner of UTM window. Then try to close UTM window with "Close" button in top left corner. If no warning dialog is shown, it's working correctly.
• Update apt using: sudo apt update
• Install curl: sudo apt install curl

Install and setup Nanobot

• Install uv using:
  • On Debian: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
  • On MacOS Monterey on Intel Mac: Download INTEL uv v0.10.11 from here, unzip, and copy/paste both files in a $PATH folder. I copied it to /usr/local/bin
• Install nanobot: uv tool install nanobot-ai
• Run: nanobot onboard
• It seems nanobot doesn't supports Claude Code Pro/Max Plans via Oauth, but it supports Codex via OAuth: nanobot provider login openai-codex
• Open ~/.nanobot/config.json in editor, and change model to: "model": "openai-codex/gpt-5.3-codex".
• Run and chat with nanobot agent: nanobot agent
• To add Whatsapp as a channel, you need git and npm.
  • For debian, install it using: 
    • curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash -
    • sudo apt install -y nodejs
    • npm --version
    • sudo apt install git
  • For Mac OS Monterey on Intel Mac: Use nvm+npm to install based on instructions here. Mac should already have git installed.
• Add Whatsapp as a channel using:
  • nanobot channels login
  • This will print a QR code on Terminal. Scan it using Whatsapp > Linked Devices. Suppose you logged in to whatsapp account 91XXXXX-YYYYY.
    • After successful login, terminal will print "✅ Connected to WhatsApp". Press CTRL+C to exit this process.
  • Open ~/.nanobot/config.json and find the whatsapp section, and edit it like this (note that enabled need to be set to true and allowFrom contains country code followed by 10 digit mobile number):
    

    {
      "channels": {
        "whatsapp": {
          "enabled": true,
          "allowFrom": ["1234567890","919999988888"]
        }
      }
    }

  • Open 2 terminal tabs and run these two processes in 2 tabs:
    

    # Terminal 1
    nanobot channels login
    
    # Terminal 2
    nanobot gateway

  • Now to test whatsapp setup: based on the example above, send a message to 91XXXXX-YYYYY from 919999988888 and ai should intercept the message and reply.
    • I have not been able to use 91XXXXX-YYYYY to talk to AI, I am using 2 numbers at the moment. If you know how to fix this, drop me an email, pretty please!
  •  

How to clear context window?

/new works on Whatsapp.

Modify SOUL.md

To start, take Openclaw's SOUL template from this url and paste it inside ~/.nanobot/workspace/SOUL.md

Restart nanobot gateway and nanobot whatsapp bridge running in 2 terminal tabs.

Setup first scheduled task

Simply send message with Add a periodic task _____ e.g.

Add a periodic task:
Send a message here every 60 minutes with text "RUNNING"

Voice transcription using Grok

Not supported on Whatsapp yet, it seems based on this commit. Try it on Telegram if you are using it.

How to run 2 commands in background?

so it starts automatically and restarts on failure.

Setting up Clawhub

Clawhub works with Nanobot. Just download the zip file from Clawhub and extract it inside ~/.nanobot/workspace/skills. For e.g.

• Visit https://clawhub.ai/buksan1950/reddit-readonly and click "Download zip" button.
• Unzip the downloaded file in ~/.nanobot/workspace/skills/.
  • The folder structure would look something like this: ~/.nanobot/workspace/skills/reddit-readonly-1.0.0/<OTHER_FILES>
• Restart nanobot gateway and nanobot whatsapp bridge running in 2 terminal tabs.
• Run this prompt to check that skill is working correctly:

Can you search ClaudeAI subreddit using reddit-readonly skill and find top 10 posts in last 1 month? 

Templates for: AGENTS.md / HEARTBEAT.md / SOUL.md / TOOLS.md / USER.md

TBD

Adding web browsing capability

TBD

Expose agents as POST API (+ callback or polling)

TBD:

• /reddit-read/ endpoint which runs a fixed prompt, api token, task id (url parameters/input?), polling

Miscellaneous links

• https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot/discussions/431