A preflight-check utility for Render services that prevents deployment failures by validating environment variables and catching placeholder values.
Install & Download
1. ClawHub CLI
The fastest way to install a skill directly from the registry.
npx clawhub@latest install render-env-guard
2. Manual Installation
Copy the skill folder to one of these locations
~/.openclaw/skills/ <project>/skills/ Priority: Workspace > Local > Bundled
3. Prompt Installation
Copy this prompt to OpenClaw to install it automatically.
Help me install render-env-guard using Clawhub. If Clawhub is not installed, install it first (npm i -g clawhub).
Prefer to download?
Get the raw skill files in a ZIP archive.
What is Render Env Guard?
Render Env Guard is a specialized developer tool designed to safeguard your production environment. As part of the Openclaw Skills ecosystem, it performs rigorous pre-deployment checks on your Render services to ensure that all critical environment variables are correctly configured. By proactively identifying missing keys, unexpanded variables, or suspicious template placeholders before a rollout begins, this skill eliminates common runtime errors and reduces the friction of cloud deployments.
This utility is specifically built for teams using Render who want to ensure that their runtime environment matches their expectations. It validates values at the service level—exactly what Render will inject at runtime—rather than just checking local files, providing a higher level of deployment confidence.
Render Env Guard Use Cases
- Pre-deployment validation before running render deploy or updating blueprints to avoid failed rollouts.
- Initial environment onboarding to ensure parity between staging, preview, and production environments.
- Troubleshooting runtime 5xx errors caused by missing or misconfigured configuration keys.
- Preventing accidental leaks of localhost database URLs or template-driven placeholder strings into live production environments.
How Render Env Guard Works
- Resolve the target Render service using either a specific Service ID or a human-readable service name.
- Authenticate with the Render API using your provided API key to fetch the current environment variable configuration.
- Iterate through a defined list of required keys to verify that every critical variable is present and non-empty.
- Analyze variable values for common anti-patterns like localhost references, unexpanded ${VAR} placeholders, or template strings.
- Generate a pass/fail report and return a non-zero exit code if issues are found, allowing CI/CD scripts to fail fast.
Render Env Guard Setup
To integrate this into your workflow with other Openclaw Skills, ensure you have curl and python3 installed in your environment.
Set your Render API key and run the guard script:
export RENDER_API_KEY="your_api_key"
bash scripts/check-render-env.sh
For advanced configurations involving specific services and custom required keys:
RENDER_SERVICE_NAME=my-web-app \
REQUIRED_ENV_KEYS="DATABASE_URL,STRIPE_SECRET,REDIS_URL" \
bash scripts/check-render-env.sh
Render Env Guard Data Schema & Taxonomy
The skill interacts with the Render API and requires specific metadata to function.
| Input Variable | Requirement | Description |
|---|---|---|
| RENDER_API_KEY | Required | Your Render personal access token. |
| RENDER_SERVICE_NAME | Optional* | The name of the service to check (*one service identifier required). |
| RENDER_SERVICE_ID | Optional* | The unique Render ID (e.g., srv-xxx) for the service. |
| REQUIRED_ENV_KEYS | Optional | Comma-separated list of keys to validate (Default: DATABASE_URL, DIRECT_URL, etc.). |
| RENDER_API_BASE_URL | Optional | The API endpoint (defaults to https://api.render.com/v1). |
Render Env Guard Advanced Features
- Fuzzy service resolution allowing for quick name-based lookups without needing full IDs.
- Automated detection of unexpanded shell-style placeholders (e.g., ${VARIABLE_NAME}) that often break runtime logic.
- Hard-fail exit codes (1) designed specifically for integration into GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins pipelines.
- Support for custom API base URLs to accommodate different API versions or proxy layers within the Openclaw Skills framework.
SKILL.md
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