Build Your First OpenClaw Plugin from Scratch – Custom Tools with Ollama

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:01]Like it or not, OpenClaw has changed the way we used to think about agentic AI.

[00:00:07]OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent platform that runs a persistent local gateway on your machine. We have been covering OpenClaw for the last two plus months and I already have done 100 plus videos on it from different angles and the way it is evolving. I could do one video every single day on a new feature as far as open claw is concerned but today I'm going to cover it from a very different angle.

[00:00:37]As we all know you can use this open claw to manage agents tools channels and model routing all in one place. But what makes it genuinely powerful in my humble opinion is its plug-in system. The core install is intentionally lean and fast and you can extend it with only what you need. If you need discord, install the discord plug-in. If you need let's say web search, you can just simply install tely or any other web search framework.

[00:01:08]Uh so is the case with telegram only one command is needed. So today in this video I'm going to unpack what this plug-in ecosystem is in openclaw and we are going to install openclaw fresh again connected to a local based model and let me quickly show you this is my Ubuntu system. This is my GPU card and the reason why I am showing you this GPU card is because I'm running this local Olama based model and I'm going to go with IBM's Grey Knight 8 billion model which we also covered yesterday.

[00:01:44]We are not going to use any API based model. Everything will be local. The only thing which I will be using with API is the Tele web search because that is what the lay of the land is. I could go with duck go but it's not that reliable. Um, Telei also offers free tier which I will be using. It's not sponsored by anyone by the way including Telei. So, uh, we are also going to integrate it with Telegram plug-in to talk to our agent from anywhere and then we will see how exactly all of this come together and do the task. So, let's get started. By the way, this is Faza and I welcome you to the channel. Please also follow me on X if you're looking for AI updates. First up, let's install Open Clawresh.

[00:02:32]And it's again a single liner. They're trying to make it as lean and fast as possible, which is always a good idea.

[00:02:42]So, open clause installed. Let's go through this motion where we are just going to accept most of these defaults.

[00:02:50]Let's go with quick start and I want to go with Olama based model. So I'm just going to go down and then let's select.

[00:02:58]Where is Olama? There you go. And I will just go local.

[00:03:05]This is my default endpoint where Olama model is already running. I don't want to go with this. I want to go with all the models and they keep changing these.

[00:03:18]So sometime it works, sometime it doesn't.

[00:03:21]And if you are unsure, I think the best way I already have covered in this first video. I still feel that this open claw with Olama video is very much valid and the best way of integrating open claw with. So I will drop the link to it in video description. Please check it out.

[00:03:38]Okay, let's go back to the terminal.

[00:03:41]And it didn't do anything there by the way. So I'll just show you what happened there.

[00:03:46]I just selected this lava base model. It didn't give me any option here and it just went with some default Java model which we will change later. Don't worry about it. And now it is asking me what sort of channel I want to go with.

[00:04:02]So I'm just going to select this Telegram bot API. And it is going to ask me some stuff about my Telegram now.

[00:04:10]Okay. So we need the Telegram bot token.

[00:04:12]And let me quickly show you my Telegram setup too.

[00:04:18]So I'm just here in the bot folder. Here I'm just going to say new bot and then I will just create a new name.

[00:04:27]I will just call it um and maybe open plug-in bot. I think that is good enough.

[00:04:41]Then I will just say the username same.

[00:04:44]And there you go. It has given me this token. So I'm just going to grab this token and paste it over there.

[00:04:51]So I'll just press enter here. Paste my token. And I wish they will mask it.

[00:05:02]And we will we can pair it later. That is not a problem. And this is where we can you know specify our search. And this is the whole plug-in system. But I can show you this also separately if you want to integrate it later.

[00:05:17]So I will just skip it for now but later we will u integrate this deyly search maybe or Dr. go we will see and then just press yes here press space bar enter and then I'm just going to go with all the defaults here let's skip for now and then it is just going to install everything and give us the prompt open clause installed as you can see let's quickly set our model all you need to do is to just run this command and the new model is set as You can see next step you can just simply restart the gateway.

[00:05:58]Gateway is restarted. And now you can list your models to verify.

[00:06:04]And there you go. Our granite model is now configured and running well.

[00:06:10]And this is where you can see that open claw is now running all integrated with Olava. Now is the time to integrate our plugins. Let's get on with it. So first up, let's check all the plugins which are installed.

[00:06:26]And there you go. These are all the plugins which are available for us in this ecosystem. I think there are 92 plugins. 70 67 are already enabled which covers every major model provider, messaging channel and tools you could need. The course stays lean and fast.

[00:06:45]You enable only what you need and everything else stays out of your way.

[00:06:49]You can even disable lot of other things. So for example, I'll just do the list here and I will grab te and that should just show us tely.

[00:07:02]There you go. So this is our tely uh which is currently disabled. So we need to enable it. I'll just clear the screen and in order to set it up. Let's first run this command which is going to set the tools here the plug-in and then you can set your table API key after enabling it and for that you would need to run this command. So let me run this and clear my screen. As I said, I'm just going to use a free tier. That should be good enough. And otherwise, uh, you know, I would just use duck co for the free web search.

[00:07:39]And then you can simply restart it the gateway. I mean, um, you can also set the tey API key in your environment variable if you like. Let me restart this.

[00:07:51]And you can see that that tely tool is now enabled. Now in some cases if you're using any other open claw version you can also try out this command to set your plug-in if the previous command doesn't work. Okay. Now let me launch our terminal user interface and we will check it out.

[00:08:14]And then you can simply run the web searches from within your open club. For example, if I could ask it to search the web and tell me about this YouTube channel from Fad Miraa. Hopefully I will have the credits in my table but I will run it.

[00:08:33]And there you go. It has uh extracted all the information from the web search. It has even come up with some of the links as you can see. And this is the stuff which it has found.

[00:08:46]Looks pretty good.

[00:08:49]Very nice.

[00:08:52]Now, open clause ecosystem is very open.

[00:08:55]Anyone can create their own plug-in. You can use it for your own use cases. Let me show you a skeleton step by-step plan as how you can create your own. So, first up, just create a new directory in um the workspace of OpenCloud. Next up, you would need to create a plug-in manifest file which should look something like this where you uh just specify the tools which your plugins are going to use and finally you will create an interface of the plug-in which will be in the typescript. So the file would look like this. They also have this whole thing in their documentation bit different example but I'm just going to make it easier just as a skeleton for example um the function which we defined above I'm just saying say hello to person. So this is just a hello plug-in which just says hello. So there you go.

[00:09:48]So these are the files which you need to do. Once you have done that, do something like uh installing the plug-in which you can simply run any um openclaw plugin like this. So you can simply uh put it in your plug-in in your manifest and then install it something like this.

[00:10:11]And you can also verify your plug-in with this inspect command. As you can see that our hello world plugin is linked, installed and loaded.

[00:10:22]And you can also see that the plug-in is now enabled and installed and you can now use it in the TUI. As you can see in the new session, I have just asked it to use this tool and say hello to FUD. Let's do it again. It is going to think and it should say hello.

[00:10:41]There you go. So this is how you can extend open claw. Create your own functionality. Maybe use it internally, privately with your local models.

[00:10:51]Connect it to your own systems and you can build anything like that. So that's it. Let me know what do you think about this. Again, please like the video, hype it and please become a member of the channel and follow me on X. Thank you for all the