Issue Draft — OpenClaw v2026.3.7 dashboard returns plain-text Not Found after upgrade

Summary

Upgrading from v2026.2.25 to v2026.3.7 caused the dashboard root (/) to return a plain-text Not Found response, even though the gateway started normally and dashboard assets existed on disk. Rolling back to v2026.2.25 restored normal behavior immediately.

Environment

• Host: Proxmox LXC
• OS: Linux 6.8.12-19-pve
• Node: 22.22.0
• Install method: pnpm global install
• Process manager: pm2
• Launch style: openclaw gateway --port 18789
• Bind mode: LAN

Expected behavior

Opening the dashboard URL should serve the Control UI HTML app.

Actual behavior

Opening the dashboard URL returns:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/plain

Not Found

Reproduction steps

1. Start from a working v2026.2.25 install where the dashboard loads normally.
2. Upgrade to v2026.3.7.
3. Start / restart the gateway with PM2.
4. Open / on the gateway port.
5. Observe plain-text Not Found instead of the dashboard UI.

What was checked

• openclaw --version showed 2026.3.7
• gateway started normally
• openclaw status reported the dashboard URL as usual
• gateway.controlUi.enabled = true
• Control UI assets existed on disk under dist/control-ui
• Host / Origin combinations were tested and did not resolve it
• Explicitly setting gateway.controlUi.root to the installed dist/control-ui path did not fix it on v2026.3.7

Workaround

Rolling back the installed OpenClaw package to v2026.2.25 restored normal behavior immediately.

On this host, a manual downgrade followed by restart brought the dashboard back:

pnpm add -g openclaw@2026.2.25
pm2 restart openclaw --update-env

After rollback, / returned 200 OK and the dashboard worked again.

Additional note

After rollback, config still warns that it was last written by the newer version, so there may also be a config-write/version-marker side effect when testing this regression.