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Channels let people reach your agent from somewhere other than the web interface. IronClaw supports Slack and Telegram.

Slack

Talk to your agent in Slack channels and direct messages.

Telegram

Talk to your agent in Telegram direct messages and group chats.

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How Channels Work

A channel is one capability surface of an extension. Installing the Slack or Telegram extension gives your agent the ability to receive and send messages there; the extension’s manifest declares the channel surface alongside any tools it provides. Setup happens in the web interface. Start the server, connect the channel, and the setup flow walks you through the credentials it needs and stores them encrypted.
Channel credentials are stored in the encrypted secret store, not in config.toml. Your configuration file names the environment variables that hold them, never the values themselves. See Security.

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Where Channel Setup Lives

This is the single most common thing to get stuck on, so it’s worth being precise. Channel setup has two halves, done in two different places:
1

Operator half: Admin → Configuration (once per instance)

In the sidebar, open Admin, then Configuration. Each channel that needs deployment credentials shows a configuration card there — Telegram deployment configuration, Slack deployment configuration, and so on. Fill in the card’s fields and save. The values are stored in the encrypted secret store.This is the half the whole instance shares: the Telegram bot token and webhook settings, the Slack app credentials.
2

Personal half: Extensions (each person)

Open Extensions, install the channel’s extension, and use Connect / Configure on its card. For Telegram this opens the pairing panel that links your Telegram account to your IronClaw user; for Slack it runs your personal OAuth connection. You can also just ask the agent in chat — it drives this half for you.

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The One Dead End to Know About

The pairing panel assumes the deployment configuration is already saved. If it isn’t, the only thing that surface can do is report:
That message is accurate but misleading — it reads like you lack permission. Nothing is wrong with your account. Complete the operator half under Admin → Configuration first, then pair.
“Connect Slack” in chat does work for the personal half of setup: the agent installs and activates the extension, and if your account still needs OAuth or pairing an in-chat connection panel opens right there. If your account is already connected, the agent confirms that and continues with your request.What the agent cannot do is the operator half — the deployment credentials under Admin → Configuration. That step is deliberately kept out of the tools the agent can drive, so it stays in the web interface where you can see what you’re authorizing. If chat setup dead-ends, complete the operator step first, then ask again.
Telegram has two setup steps that are easy to confuse: an operator saves the deployment configuration once for the whole instance, and then each person pairs their own Telegram account to their IronClaw user. The “administrator must configure” error means step one hasn’t happened yet.

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Receiving Messages

Both channels deliver events by webhook, so the messaging platform needs to reach your IronClaw instance over HTTPS. On a laptop behind NAT that means either a public host or a forwarding service; a served deployment already has a reachable URL. Each channel’s page covers the exact callback URL to register.

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Not Using a Channel?

You don’t need one. The web interface and the terminal both talk to the same agent:
Discord, Signal, WeChat, and WeCom were available in IronClaw v1 and are not part of the 1.0 release. If you depend on one of them, stay on v1 until it returns.