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Which Slack transport fits your deployment shape, and how Socket Mode behaves at runtime.

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Choosing a transport

Socket Mode and HTTP Request URLs reach feature parity for messaging, slash commands, App Home, and interactivity. Pick by deployment shape, not features.
Pick Socket Mode for single-Gateway hosts, dev laptops, and on-prem networks that can reach *.slack.com outbound but cannot accept inbound HTTPS.Pick HTTP Request URLs when running multiple Gateway replicas behind a load balancer, when outbound WSS is blocked but inbound HTTPS is allowed, or when you already terminate Slack webhooks at a reverse proxy.
Slack can maintain multiple Socket Mode connections for one app and may deliver each payload to any connection. Separate OpenClaw gateways that share a Slack app therefore need equivalent routing and authorization configuration. Otherwise, use a separate Slack app per gateway, a single relay ingress, or HTTP Request URLs behind a load balancer. See Using Socket Mode.

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Relay mode

Relay mode separates Slack ingress from the OpenClaw gateway. A trusted router owns the single Slack Socket Mode connection, chooses a destination gateway, and forwards a typed event over an authenticated websocket. The gateway still uses its own bot token for outbound Slack Web API calls.
The relay URL must use wss:// unless it targets localhost. Treat the bearer token and router route table as part of the Slack authorization boundary: routed events enter the normal Slack message handler as authorized activations. A router-provided slack_identity in the websocket hello frame can set the default outbound username and icon; an explicit identity supplied by the caller still wins. The relay connection reconnects with the same bounded backoff timing as Socket Mode and clears the router-provided identity whenever it disconnects.

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Socket Mode transport tuning

OpenClaw sets the Slack SDK client pong timeout to 15 seconds for Socket Mode. This is a fixed internal default and is not operator-configurable. Notes:
  • The channels.slack.socketMode object, including clientPingTimeout, serverPingTimeout, and pingPongLoggingEnabled, is retired and is no longer read at runtime. openclaw doctor flags retired layout tuning knobs with a general notice rather than a per-key path. openclaw doctor --fix removes those three fields wherever they appear, at the channel root and under accounts.<accountId>, and drops the socketMode object once it is empty. Any other key you added inside it is left alone, so delete it by hand.
  • App messages and events remain application state, not transport liveness signals.
  • Socket Mode restart backoff starts around 2 seconds and caps around 30 seconds. Recoverable start, start-wait, and disconnect failures retry until the channel stops. Permanent account and credential errors such as invalid auth, revoked tokens, or missing scopes fail fast instead of retrying forever.