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Sessions

A session is a time-limited grant of access to one target. Minting a session produces a token; a browser request carrying that token (it rides in the session URL) is verified by the gateway and forwarded to the target. No token, no access — unless you've explicitly marked a domain public.

Sessions are owned by the gateway and stored locally; the cloud console mirrors them so you can see and manage them from anywhere. Each session has a target, an optional label (free text, up to 64 characters — "for Alex", "demo until Friday"), a creation time, and an expiry.

Two kinds of session

Full sessions are the normal kind: one URL that opens the target — every page of it — until the session expires or you revoke it. Mint one, send the link, done.

Page-share sessions are for sharing single pages of an app rather than the whole thing. Minting one returns a base token plus a share seed; the target application uses the seed to derive a separate token per page, so each link you hand out opens exactly one page. This needs a small amount of support inside the target app — the derivation recipe and code samples live in the per-page sharing developer guide.

Minting

Mint sessions from a target's detail view — in the local console or the cloud console — choosing a label and a TTL. The default TTL is 24 hours.

For a page-share session, the mint response is special: it shows the base token, the share seed, and an example URL, and the seed is shown to you at mint time with a copy-it-now warning. Treat the seed like a password — anyone holding it can derive valid page links. Both consoles can re-reveal it later from the session row: the local console reads it directly (loopback-only, on the gateway machine), and the cloud console's reveal is a live pull from your gateway through the relay — the cloud never stores the seed itself.

TTL, extend, relabel, revoke

Every session expires on its own at the end of its TTL. Until then you can manage it from either console:

  • Extend / set expiration — pick a number of days (1 to 365); the expiry becomes that many days from now. The default in the dialog is 30.
  • Relabel — change the display label any time; the token is untouched.
  • Revoke — kill the session immediately. Links stop working at once, and a revoked session cannot be extended back to life: mint a new one instead.
  • Delete — remove the (expired or revoked) row from the list entirely.

Sessions survive restarts — but not target deletion

Sessions are persisted in the gateway's store, so a gateway restart or machine reboot doesn't invalidate your links. Deleting the session's target does — see the warning in Targets.

Instead of sending someone the raw session URL, you can send a gated share link. The Share action on a session row produces a https://…/share/<code> link; whoever opens it signs in to Burrowee first and is then taken to the session viewer. That gives you a named, sign-in-gated handoff — useful when "anyone holding the URL" is too loose — while revocation still works exactly the same: revoke the session and the share link dies with it.