Cloud accounts

Signing in, Cloud Sync across devices with your secret values encrypted, and public collection sharing.

In this chapter

• Signing in
• The account menu
• Cloud Sync
• What syncs and what doesn’t
• The sync passphrase
• Unlocking on another device
• The sync button
• Managing sync
• Collection sharing

An account is entirely optional — Beacon is fully usable signed out. Signing in unlocks Cloud Sync (your data across devices) and makes collection sharing convenient.

Signing in

On first launch, an optional Sign in to Beacon prompt appears (Optional — identity only, no sync or sharing yet.). Dismiss it with Skip for now, or sign in later from the Toolbar’s Sign in button. There are three methods:

• GitHub or Google — opens the provider’s page in your default browser (reusing any existing login) and catches the redirect back to Beacon. On success the browser shows ✓ Signed in to Beacon. You can close this tab and return to the app.
• Email + password — fill both fields and click Sign in, or switch to Create account to register. Forgot password? sends a reset email.

The account menu

Signed in, the Toolbar shows your avatar and name with a small green/red dot for online/offline. Click it for the account menu: your email; a sync control (Enable Sync, Unlock Sync, or Sync now (N/5 today) depending on state); Sync settings (opens Settings → Sync); and Sign out.

Note: Signing out clears the session on this device and stops sync, but never deletes your local data.

Cloud Sync

Cloud Sync keeps your collections, environments, and settings consistent across the machines you’re signed in on. Enable it from the account menu (Enable Sync). It’s off until you turn it on.

Once active, a background poll pushes local changes every few seconds, and a manual Sync now does a push-then-pull. Conflicts resolve newest-writer-wins per item (by last-modified time), with a pending un-pushed local edit always winning over an incoming cloud version.

Note: Manual syncs are rate-limited to 5 per 24 hours; the automatic background sync is not affected.

What syncs and what doesn’t

Synced: collections (and their folders, requests, scripts, auth, and variables), environments, global variables, workspaces, mock routes, flows, and app settings.

Not synced: request/response history; load-test configs, runs, and samples; and your proxy host/port and credentials (kept per-device). Secret variable values are encrypted before upload (see below).

Note: A collection carries its script trust across sync, unlike an import. One you enabled scripts for on another device arrives ready to run them; one you never enabled — or one saved before the trust flag existed — arrives untrusted and has to be enabled here. The rule is that only an explicit yes travels, so trust is never invented on the way. See Collections.

A flow is the same: its Script nodes and any script on an inline request run on arrival without a separate prompt, because a synced flow is your own code coming from your own device under your own passphrase. A flow that arrives in a bundle is treated as foreign and has its scripts stripped instead — see Collections.

How flows travel. Everything about a flow uploads in the clear on the same terms a collection’s contents do — the canvas layout and wiring, flow and node names, condition sources, extract rows, links to saved requests, request URLs and bodies, and Script node code. Two credential-bearing spots are encrypted first, under the same passphrase as your secret variables:

• An Inline Request node’s credentials — its auth (bearer token, basic username and password, API-key value, OAuth2 client secret, password, and access/refresh tokens), any credential-bearing header such as Authorization, Cookie, or X-Api-Key, a custom-named header or query-param row carrying that request’s API key, and a user:pass@ or API key written into the URL itself. A Linked Request node has no credentials of its own — the saved request it points to is protected as part of its collection.
• An Input node field’s Default value, when that field has Secret (masked) turned on.

Nothing else in a flow counts as a credential, so a token you hardcode into a URL path, a body, or a script uploads exactly as you typed it. See Flows.

Note: Flows only began syncing in v0.1.0. If you built flows on an earlier version they stayed on this machine; they upload on your first sync after upgrading — the next Sync now, passphrase unlock, or launch with sync on. If you’d rather they didn’t leave the machine, turn sync off or delete them before that first sync.

The sync passphrase

Your secret variable values are protected by a sync passphrase that only you know — Beacon never sees it, and it can’t be recovered if forgotten. It’s separate from your account password.

When you enable sync, you set the passphrase (minimum 8 characters, entered twice). Beacon derives an encryption key from it and encrypts only your secret-flagged values before upload; everything else syncs in the clear. The passphrase is cached in your OS keychain when available, so you don’t re-enter it each launch.

Warning: If you forget the passphrase it cannot be recovered. Your only option is to reset sync encryption from Settings → Sync, which sets a new passphrase from the current device and requires every other device to unlock again.

Unlocking on another device

Sign in on a second device and Beacon shows Unlock Cloud Sync, asking for the passphrase you set on the first device. Enter it and click Unlock. A wrong passphrase shows Incorrect passphrase.

The sync button

The Toolbar’s dedicated sync icon reflects state, in priority order:

Signed out or with sync off, the icon is greyed and non-interactive.

Managing sync

The Settings → Sync tab holds the rest:

• Change Passphrase — re-encrypts all secrets under a new key; other devices then need the new passphrase.
• Forgot Passphrase? — resets encryption from this device (with a required acknowledgment that other devices must unlock again).
• Disable sync — turns sync off on this device; an optional checkbox also deletes your synced data from the cloud. Local data is always kept.

Collection sharing

You can publish a collection as a public link that anyone can import — no account required to import.

Publishing. From a collection’s ⋯ menu, Share… creates a link like beacon://share/<code>, shown with a Copy button. Before publishing, Beacon strips credentials: secret variable values, auth fields (bearer tokens, basic passwords, API-key values, OAuth secrets/tokens), and credential-bearing headers (authorization, cookie, x-api-key, and similar).

Warning: Beacon can’t detect tokens hardcoded directly into a URL, header value, or body. Review the collection for those before sharing — the share modal warns you of this.

Importing a share. The Import from share button (link icon) in the Collections header takes a share link or code and imports the collection as <name> (shared) into your active workspace. Its scripts arrive untrusted. Importing is an unauthenticated public read — you don’t need to be signed in.

Revoking. The Manage shares button (users icon) lists collections you’ve shared; Revoke deletes the shared copy so no one can import it again.

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See also: Settings · Collections · Variables and environments · Getting started