Summary

On macOS, the Gateway daemon service PATH excludes user bin directories — including ~/.nix-profile/bin, ~/.bun/bin, ~/.local/bin, and other common user-level binary paths. This means tools installed via Nix (and other user-level package managers) are unavailable to exec commands run by the Gateway.

Root cause

OpenClaw already has code to detect Nix profile paths (addNixProfileBinDirs in runtime-paths) and other user bin dirs (resolveDarwinUserBinDirs). However, getMinimalServicePathParts disables user dirs on macOS by default:

// runtime-paths
const includeUserDirs = options.includeUserDirs ?? platform !== "darwin";

This means resolveDarwinUserBinDirs (which calls addNixProfileBinDirs, addCommonUserBinDirs, etc.) is never invoked on macOS.

Additionally, mergeServicePath does not preserve existing PATH entries on macOS:

// auth-install-policy
addPath(nextPath);
if (platform !== "darwin") addPath(existingPath, { preserve: true });

So even if the operator manually edits ~/.openclaw/service-env/ai.openclaw.gateway.env to add extra PATH dirs, those changes are lost on the next openclaw gateway install.

Expected behavior

User bin directories (especially ~/.nix-profile/bin) should be included in the daemon PATH on macOS, just as they are on Linux. The detection code already exists — it's just gated behind includeUserDirs = false for darwin.

Suggested fix

One or both of:

1. Change default: Set includeUserDirs = true for darwin in getMinimalServicePathParts, matching Linux behavior.
2. Add config option: Expose a config setting (e.g. env.servicePath.includeUserDirs: true or env.servicePath.extraDirs: ["/Users/me/.nix-profile/bin"]) so operators can opt in without code changes.

Workaround

Manually edit ~/.openclaw/service-env/ai.openclaw.gateway.env to prepend the nix profile bin dir to PATH. This must be re-applied after every openclaw gateway install.

Environment

• OS: macOS (Darwin)
• OpenClaw: 2026.6.10
• Nix installed via nix-daemon, ~/.nix-profile/bin populated