openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Gateway silently skips channel initialization on plugin/runtime mismatch or missing module files

Problem Summary

Gateway startup appears to complete successfully (logs gateway ready), but several channels are silently never initialized. No ERROR-level logs clearly indicate that a channel was skipped. This makes root-cause diagnosis very difficult.

Environment

• OS: Windows 10 (x64)
• Node: 24.14.1
• OpenClaw: 2026.5.12 (f066dd2)
• Channels affected: eishu (primary), plus bundled channels (irc, signal, imessage) also fail to load

What Happened

Case 1: Plugin version mismatch

• @openclaw/feishu was at 2026.5.22 while Gateway runtime was 2026.5.12
• Feishu plugin registration threw: TypeError: (0 , _setup.createSetupTranslator) is not a function
• Gateway continued startup; feishu channel was never created
• Result: All message calls to eishu returned Channel is unavailable: feishu

Case 2: Missing generated module files after restart

• After user restarted Gateway, log showed: Session delivery recovery failed: Cannot find module 'server-restart-sentinel-DaLonhWX.js' [channels] failed to load bundled channel irc: missing generated module [channels] failed to load bundled channel signal: missing generated module [channels] failed to load bundled channel imessage: missing generated module
• Critical: The eishu channel produced no logs at all during this restart — neither success nor failure. It was simply absent from the starting channels and sidecars... phase.
• http server listening showed only 7 plugins (vs 8 in the prior boot), confirming something was dropped.

Case 3: Feishu API timeout masking the real issue

Even when the plugin was present, the feishu bot-info probe timed out: AxiosError: timeout of 30000ms exceeded url: https://open.feishu.cn/open-apis/auth/v3/tenant_access_token/internal code: ECONNABORTED This timeout error was buried in INFO-level console output, not surfaced as a channel health warning.

Performance Impact Observed

With ~116 skills / 179 code files installed, startup is severely delayed:

• core-plugin-tools stage: 16–19 seconds
  • plugin-tools load alone: 10–16 seconds
• provider auth state pre-warmed: 414,885 ms (~6.9 minutes), blocking the event loop
• ventLoopDelayMaxMs peaks at 8,500–9,700 ms during normal operation
• model-prewarm routinely times out after 5,000 ms

Suggested Improvements

1. Plugin compatibility gate at startup: Before loading a channel plugin, verify its ersion/peerDependencies against the Gateway runtime version. Fail fast with a clear ERROR log if incompatible.

2. Channel init audit log: After starting channels and sidecars..., emit a summary:

   • Channels attempted: N
   • Channels loaded successfully: M
   • Channels failed: [list with reason] This would have immediately shown that eishu was missing.

3. Hot plugin reload or re-scan: After pm install / pm update of a plugin, Gateway should detect the change and reload the channel without requiring a full restart.

4. Graceful degradation on missing modules: If a bundled channel's generated .js is missing, log the filesystem path explicitly and suggest pm install -g openclaw@latest.

5. Lazy / deferred plugin loading for large skill sets: With 100+ skills, scanning all manifest files on every session boot is excessive. Consider caching immutable plugin metadata across the process lifetime (the 2026.5.24 release notes mention some perf work here — would be great to backport or confirm coverage for Windows skill-heavy installs).

6. Surface external API timeouts as channel health warnings: A 30s timeout to open.feishu.cn should be a WARN/ERROR under channels/feishu, not an INFO-level Axios dump.

Reproduction Steps

1. Install OpenClaw 2026.5.12
2. Install a newer feishu plugin ( pm install @openclaw/[email protected]) or corrupt the npm install so generated module files are missing
3. Restart Gateway
4. Observe that message --channel feishu returns Channel is unavailable with no clear error at startup

Happy to provide full logs (openclaw-2026-05-25.log) or run further diagnostics if helpful.