OpenClaw 2026.9.6 upgrade record

Prepared on 2026-09-25 from OpenClaw 2026.9.5. The official runtime and matching Gateway client, protocol, and SMS packages are pinned to 2026.9.6. The terminal Codex CLI remains independently pinned to 0.155.1. OpenClaw's Codex plugin uses app-server 0.155.1.

Release coordinates

• Upstream source: eb377ac59e6c9fd6c7705028034812becf00271b.
• Official image: ghcr.io/openclaw/openclaw:2026.9.6@sha256:0a5ff5e682e62afa19149df126aa50063bf65ef885b5c94713ce32dc0eb12e15.
• Image source labels, npm provenance, and openclaw --version agree.
• The reviewed local workspace image is sha256:948dd4ecd6891c2723893d1e06d71999f5a387c4a991fcc32279bed8c08a1bcf.

Compatibility and Skill Workshop policy

The 2026.9.6 startup migration creates protected SQLite backups, upgrades agent databases, and moves legacy Skill Workshop ownership into per-agent directories. Autonomous Workshop capture and maintenance are disabled with skills.workshop.autonomous.mode="off"; explicit user-requested skill work remains available.

The separately installed Codex app-server now matches the upstream plugin's 0.155.1 dependency. The upstream /app tree remains unmodified.

Validation

• Release inspection, pin synchronization, package-lock regeneration, and the complete make validate suite passed.
• The official public CLI dry-run, atomic-write, rejection, and unrelated-key preservation smoke test passed.
• All 129,448 upstream /app entries match the official base; fingerprint c92bcaf60d363f80283d6888b5219c493cdca85de20e5983ee108f9d410e8774.
• The Samuel Cavazos portal candidate reported the exact runtime and retained its same-origin GIF recovery assets before promotion.
• Pre-migration live and recovery copies passed 11 SQLite quick checks each.
• After promotion, the portal and both private M365 sidecars became healthy, the Gateway reported ready, database verification passed, and the public greeter returned a valid KLIPY GIF through the same-origin proxy.

Recovery

The Samuel deployment preserves the prior Compose descriptor, exact image identifiers, configuration, and a stopped-state copy under its protected maintenance backups. The 2026.9.6 migration also wrote its own pre-startup SQLite backups. Restoring the old state discards later writes and must be done only while the stack is stopped.

The managed ARM64 rehearsal on 2026-09-28 found that an existing schema-21 agent database rejects session-history access until the public openclaw doctor --fix --non-interactive migration runs with the Gateway stopped. Neural Labs startup now performs that migration once per pinned upstream release, before Gateway startup or provider reconciliation, and records completion only on success. Failure keeps the deployment gated. The synthetic migration probe exercises this same startup helper and verifies retained transcripts and credential ownership.

Upstream evidence: 2026.9.6 release, Skill Workshop configuration.