palaia

palaia v2.7 — Agent Memory Skill

palaia is the memory system for OpenClaw agents. It gives you persistent, searchable, crash-safe memory across sessions. You don't need to understand how it works — just use the commands below.

First-Time Setup

When a user asks you to "set up palaia", "enable memory", or "remember things across sessions", run these steps:

pip install "palaia[fastembed]"

palaia init

This creates .palaia/ with SQLite storage and automatically configures fastembed for semantic search. No manual configuration needed.

Confirm success to the user: "Memory is ready. I'll automatically remember important context from our conversations."

If pip is not available, try alternatives in this order:

python3 -m pip install "palaia[fastembed]"
uv tool install "palaia[fastembed]"
pipx install "palaia[fastembed]"

Optional extras (install as needed):

pip install "palaia[mcp]"          # MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor
pip install "palaia[curate]"       # Knowledge curation

Note: palaia[fastembed] already includes sqlite-vec for native SIMD vector search. No separate install needed.

OpenClaw Plugin Setup (for Auto-Capture and Auto-Recall)

After the CLI is installed, wire it into OpenClaw:

openclaw plugins install @byte5ai/palaia

Then activate the memory slot in OpenClaw config:

// openclaw.json
{
  plugins: {
    slots: { memory: "palaia" }
  }
}

Restart the gateway and verify:

openclaw gateway restart
palaia doctor

Agent Identity (optional)

Single-agent systems work with the default name. For multi-agent setups:

palaia init --agent YOUR_AGENT_NAME

Updating palaia

When the user asks to update, or when palaia status shows a version mismatch:

palaia upgrade

This auto-detects the install method (pip/uv/pipx), preserves all installed extras (fastembed, mcp, sqlite-vec, curate), runs palaia doctor --fix, and upgrades the OpenClaw plugin if installed. No manual steps needed.