Glossary

One-line definitions for terms used across the Leash docs. Link to a specific term with /docs/glossary#term-id.

Gateway: The Leash edge that handles auth, access control, and routing before a request ever reaches your app's container. Apps deployed to Leash sit behind it by default. See Access control.
Organization: The billing and permission boundary in Leash. Sources, integrations, and API keys live at the org level — apps in the org inherit access. One user can belong to multiple organizations and switch between them with leash org use.
Plan tier: Starter, Growth, and Scale — the three pricing tiers. Some SDK surfaces (e.g. dynamic env vars) are gated to Growth+; lane selection is a Scale-tier feature. See pricing.
Capability tier: Leash describes its SDK surface as four opt-in capability tiers: Tier 1 (hosting + access control), Tier 2 (integrations), Tier 3 (dynamic env vars), Tier 4 (identity in code). Capability tiers are SDK concepts; plan tiers are billing concepts. They overlap but aren't the same — Tier 2 MCP integrations require the Growth plan, while the Tier 1 hosting capability is included in every plan. See Building with Leash.
Lane: The runtime your app runs on: shared (multi-tenant Cloud Run, the default for every deploy) or dedicated (per-app VM with reserved capacity). Selecting a dedicated lane is a Scale-tier feature and reserves a month of credits upfront.
Prototype mode: An opt-in flag for AI-generated artifacts. Apps in prototype mode have different runtime and billing characteristics than full deploys (details TBD as the surface stabilizes).
Integration: A third-party service Leash has wired into the SDK (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Linear, Slack, HubSpot, etc.). Auth, rate-limiting, and retries happen inside the gateway — your code calls leash.integrations.<name> and gets typed results back. See Integrations.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): The protocol Leash uses to call non-Google integrations via standardized tool calls. When the SDK doesn't yet expose a typed wrapper for a provider, you reach it through the generic leash.integrations.mcp(name, tool, args) escape hatch.
BYO connect: “Bring your own” paste-a-token connection flow for providers without an OAuth integration in Leash. The token lives encrypted in your org's secrets and is injected on every call to that integration.
Source: Where a secret value actually lives — Doppler, 1Password, Bitwarden, Infisical, GCP Secret Manager, an HTTPS webhook you control, or values typed directly into Leash (Native). Sources are configured once per org and shared across apps. See App env vars.
.env.example manifest: Your repo's .env.example file — Leash reads only the key names. It's how each app declares which org-level secrets it needs. Commit it; never commit .env.local.
SDK: @leash/sdk — the JS/TS client your app code uses to call integrations, fetch dynamic env vars, and read the calling user. It's opt-in: Tier 1 apps don't install it at all. See Building with Leash.
leash-auth cookie: The signed HttpOnly cookie the gateway sets on .leash.build. Carries the calling user's identity. Set automatically on deployed apps; in local dev you wire the dev-auth handler to mint a localhost copy. See Local dev.
Org API key: The lsk_live_* token your app uses to authenticate SDK calls. Minted at /dashboard/organization. Required for Tier 2+ (SDK) usage. Auto-injected in production; you set it in .env.local for local dev.
App URL suffix: The random suffix appended to your app's URL (e.g. my-app-abc123.un.leash.build). Picked at first deploy and immutable from that point on. The .un. indicates it's on the shared subdomain space.