OpenClaw 5.28: Codex Plugin Broken After Upgrade — Fix with Symlink Shim

Upgrading OpenClaw from 5.12 to 5.28 can silently break the Codex plugin. After the upgrade, all agent calls hang at Waiting for agent reply, cron jobs time out at exactly 121 seconds with model-call-started, and the fallback chain doesn't kick in fast enough. The gateway starts clean, OAuth is valid, and Codex shows as installed and enabled — but every binary spawn attempt fails with a silent ENOENT.

Root Cause: Path Mismatch

The 5.28 Codex plugin harness expects the binary at:

vendor/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/codex/codex

But the package ships the binary at:

vendor/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/bin/codex

The plugin never finds the binary, so every spawn attempt hangs.

Fix: Create a Symlink Shim

Set the Codex extension directory and symlink the binary:

CODEX_DIR="/home/clawbot/.openclaw/extensions/codex/node_modules/@openai/codex-linux-x64/vendor/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl"
sudo mkdir -p "$CODEX_DIR/codex"
sudo ln -sf "$CODEX_DIR/bin/codex" "$CODEX_DIR/codex/codex"
sudo chown -h clawbot:clawbot "$CODEX_DIR/codex/codex"
sudo systemctl restart openclaw

After restart, agent calls should resume normally.

Important Caveats

• Reinstall or force-update of the Codex plugin wipes the extensions directory, so you must recreate the symlink after each reinstall.
• If your systemd service uses an ExecStartPost chmod on the Codex binary, update that path to bin/codex as well.

This was reproduced on Ubuntu 24.04, npm install, systemd service. Hopefully this saves you a few hours of debugging.