openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix bonjour plugin loads + CIAO unhandled rejections cause sporadic ACP spawn failures, despite plugins.entries.bonjour.enabled=false [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

In openclaw 2026.4.24:

1. The bonjour plugin (newly added in this version) loads regardless of plugins.entries.bonjour.enabled: false in openclaw.json. Other plugins (talk-voice) honor the same enabled: false config and are correctly excluded from the gateway-ready plugin list. Bonjour is not.

2. The bonjour plugin throws repeated Unhandled promise rejection: CIAO ANNOUNCEMENT CANCELLED errors. These appear when the bonjour watchdog re-advertises (bonjour: restarting advertiser (service stuck in announcing for ~16000ms)) and the previous CIAO announcement gets cancelled.

3. These crashes appear to destabilize the gateway during ACP spawn operations — observed multiple sessions_spawn(runtime="acp") failures with gateway closed (1006 abnormal closure (no close frame)) or gateway timeout after 10000ms immediately following CIAO rejection events in the gateway log.

Reproduction

1. Install openclaw 2026.4.24 on a host where bonjour mDNS announcement is unreliable (anything with a Mac on a flaky LAN, or laptops moving between networks).
2. Set plugins.entries.bonjour.enabled: false in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json.
3. Restart daemon: openclaw daemon restart.
4. Check the gateway-ready log line: bonjour is still in the loaded plugin list.
5. Watch /tmp/openclaw/openclaw-YYYY-MM-DD.log for CIAO ANNOUNCEMENT CANCELLED errors. They will appear every ~15-30s as the bonjour watchdog cycles.
6. Trigger an ACP spawn during a CIAO rejection window — sessions_spawn will fail with abnormal closure or timeout.

Expected

• plugins.entries.bonjour.enabled: false should prevent the bonjour plugin from loading at all (consistent with talk-voice and other entries that respect this flag).
• CIAO ANNOUNCEMENT CANCELLED should be caught/handled inside the bonjour plugin, not bubble up as an unhandled promise rejection that destabilizes the gateway.

Workaround

None reliable. enabled: false doesn't work. Forcibly killing bonjour from outside isn't an option since it's bundled. Only choice today is to live with the noise + occasional spawn failures.

Why this matters

Phase-2-style architectures (Charlie main → ACP delegation for substantive work) become unreliable when ACP spawn fails sporadically. We see ~10-20% of ACP spawn attempts timing out or aborting due to gateway instability traceable to CIAO crashes. Plus the unhandled rejection noise pollutes logs and triggers stability-bundle dumps.

Environment

• openclaw 2026.4.24
• macOS (Apple Silicon, Mac mini)
• LAN with multiple subnets / flaky mDNS visibility
• Gateway running as launchd service ai.openclaw.gateway
• 7 plugins enabled in config (acpx, browser, device-pair, discord, phone-control, telegram + bonjour despite enabled: false)

Related

• Bonjour plugin appears to be new in 2026.4.24 — no entry in earlier plugins.entries defaults
• ACP architecture: see #72210 (filed earlier today re cron delivery cosmetic noise)