openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Windows: Slack channel fails to start with ESM URL error (`c:` protocol) in v2026.4.24 [1 comments, 2 participants]

"discovery": { "mdns": { "mode": "off" } }

Log excerpt

{"subsystem":"gateway/channels/slack"} [default] starting provider {"subsystem":"gateway/channels/slack"} [default] channel exited: Only URLs with a scheme in: file, data, and node are supported by the default ESM loader. On Windows, absolute paths must be valid file:// URLs. Received protocol 'c:' {"subsystem":"gateway/channels/slack"} [default] auto-restart attempt 1/10 in 5s

OpenClaw version

2026.4.24

Operating system

Windows 11

Install method

No response

Model

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Provider / routing chain

From the stack trace logged when the Slack channel exited, the call chain was: 1. gateway/channels/slack — [default] starting provider 2. resolveSlackBotToken — fetching the bot token SecretRef 3. resolveSlackAccount — resolving the full Slack account config 4. Object.resolveAccount (channel-config-helpers-D7luFLJH.js:148) 5. Object.resolveAccountForAccessors aliased as resolveAccount (:268) 6. Object.resolveAllowFrom (:157) — building the allowFrom access list 7. buildAccountNotes (status.scan.runtime-CEY-ZATF.js:232) — this was actually in the openclaw status CLI path, not the gateway channel startup To clarify: the gateway Slack channel crash had a different (shorter) chain — the channel exited immediately on starting provider with the ESM URL error, meaning it failed at the dynamic import() of the plugin-runtime-deps module before any Slack API calls were made. The longer resolveAllowFrom → resolveAccount chain was from openclaw status trying to render the channel status in the CLI, not from the channel provider itself.

Additional provider/model setup details

No response

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

TL;DR

The most likely fix is to use pathToFileURL() from the url module when constructing the import specifier to convert raw Windows paths to file:// URLs.

Guidance

• The root cause appears to be a dynamic import() call passing a raw Windows path instead of a file:// URL, which is rejected by Node.js ESM.
• To verify the issue, check the stack trace and logs for the ESM URL error message indicating that only URLs with schemes file, data, and node are supported.
• A temporary workaround is to roll back to version 2026.4.12 using npm install -g [email protected].
• To prevent the gateway from crashing, add "discovery": { "mdns": { "mode": "off" } } to openclaw.json, although this does not fix the Slack channel issue.

Example

No code example is provided as the exact implementation details are not specified in the issue.

Notes

The provided workaround only prevents the gateway from crashing and does not resolve the Slack channel issue. A proper fix would involve modifying the code to use pathToFileURL() when constructing the import specifier.

Recommendation

Apply the workaround by rolling back to version 2026.4.12 until a proper fix is available, as it is the most straightforward way to restore functionality.