llmgw/docs/onboarding.md

Onboarding a user

Written for whoever operates an llmgw deployment: the person with a shell on the control plane machine.

There are two ways a person gets a key. Pick one and put it in the config.

	Self-service	Operator-issued
Config	auth.signup_open: true	auth.signup_open: false
They do	sign up, wait, then make their own keys	wait for a link
You do	approve once	issue every key
Good for	more than a handful of people	a few, or machines

Self-service does not mean open. A signup produces an account that can do nothing at all; approval is what makes it work, and approval needs a shell here rather than a session cookie, because it is the step that decides who gets to spend the cluster.

Everything below runs as the user the server runs as, so the files it creates stay readable by it:

sudo -u llmgw llmgw <command> --store /var/lib/llmgw/llmgw.db

Self-service

Turn on the form:

auth:
  enabled: true
  store: /var/lib/llmgw/llmgw.db
  signup_open: true

The landing page then links to it, and the rest is:

llmgw users list --pending --store …
ID                    EMAIL              NAME   STATE    PROJECT  SIGNED UP
usr-k4mq…             ayse@example.com   Ayşe   pending  -        4m12s ago

llmgw users approve usr-k4mq… --project default --by ilker --store …

That is the whole operator loop. From then on they sign in at /login, and /profile is where they create keys, see when each was last used, and revoke the ones they are done with. A key is shown once on the page that creates it and never again.

This gateway sends no email. There is no "your account was approved" message and no password reset, so tell people what to expect: they sign up, they tell you, you approve, they sign in. If that loop is too manual for your size, it is the thing to automate — not the approval step.

To close an account:

llmgw users suspend usr-k4mq… --store …

which closes their sessions immediately. Their API keys keep working — those are separate credentials, and revoking them is a separate step:

llmgw keys list --project default --store …
llmgw keys revoke key-… --store …

That separation is deliberate: a suspended person's running jobs should not all fail at once without someone deciding they should.

Operator-issued

With signup_open: false there is no form, and you issue keys yourself. This is also the path for things that are not people — CI, a notebook server, a script.

Decide where the key belongs

Keys hang off a project, projects off a team, teams off an organization. Limits can be set at any of those levels and compose downward by taking the most restrictive value — a key cannot raise what its team set, and a team cannot raise what its organization set. That is the only rule under which a budget means anything.

If you have no structure yet, one of each is fine:

llmgw keys init --store … --org mynodes --team default --project default

It is idempotent: running it again renames rather than duplicating, so it can live in whatever provisions the machine.

Split it when you want separate limits or separate reporting, not before.

Issue the key as a one-time link

llmgw keys create --store … \
  --project default \
  --band gold \
  --base-url https://llmgw.example \
  --claim \
  "ayse-laptop"

https://llmgw.example/claim/3mKq…

Send the link, not the key.

A key pasted into a chat window stays in that chat window forever, searchable by everyone who joins the channel later. A link works once and then expires, so the worst case is someone opening it before the intended person — which you find out about, because they will tell you the link is dead.

The name is for you, not the user: it appears in keys list and is how you will know which key to revoke.

Why the link is safe to store. The key is sealed with the link's own token, and the token is never written down — only its hash is. A database leak yields two useless hashes and a blob nothing in the database can open.

Without --claim the key is printed to stdout instead, for when you are provisioning something that is not a person:

llmgw keys create --store … --project ci "github-runner" > /run/secrets/llmgw-key

Limits

Limits are optional. A key with none is unlimited, which is the right default on a private cluster and the wrong one the moment the gateway faces anything else.

# Everyone in this project
llmgw keys limits --store … --scope project --id default \
  --rpm 60 --tpm 200000

# One key, tighter
llmgw keys limits --store … --scope key --id key-mpmip77twpt7qaxc \
  --rpm 10

# Restrict which models
llmgw keys limits --store … --scope project --id default \
  --models qwen-0.5b,llama-3.3-70b

An absent model list permits everything. An empty one permits nothing — --models "" is a way to suspend a project without revoking its keys.

Allowlists compose by intersection: a key cannot add a model its team withheld. A model's canonical name and any of its aliases name the same thing, so either form works.

Budgets are counted in micro-units, and what a unit means is yours to decide. Self-hosted models have no per-token price, so it can be GPU-seconds, a notional rate, or 1 000 000 everywhere — which turns a budget into a plain token quota. Models are priced in the server's auth.pricing section; a model priced at zero is exempt from budget checks, which is what lets a key with nothing left still be served a cheap fallback.

llmgw keys limits --store … --scope project --id default \
  --budget 50000000 --period month        # 50 units a month

The landing page

Someone who reaches the gateway without a key sees the landing page. Tell it who to send them to, or it can only shrug:

landing:
  contact: "platform@example.com"   # or an https:// URL, or "#platform on Slack"
  notice: "Internal use only."

An address becomes a mailto link, an http(s) URL stays a link, anything else is shown as text. Other schemes are never linked — configuration is not always written by whoever runs the gateway, and a javascript: href on a page served to every visitor is a short path to a stored XSS.

What the user sees

They open the link, press the button, and get the key once. The page shows them the base URL and a working curl, and points at two endpoints:

• GET /v1/models — what this key may use
• GET /me — its limits and what it has spent

/me is there so nobody has to ask you "why was I rate limited" or "how much have I used". It is outside /v1 because it is not part of the OpenAI API.

Rotation and revocation

llmgw keys list --store … --project default

LAST USED is written in batches rather than per request, so it lags by up to a minute. It is the column that tells you whether a key is still in use, which is what makes rotation safe:

To rotate, issue the new key, let both work while the user switches, watch LAST USED on the old one stop moving, then revoke it.

llmgw keys revoke --store … key-mpmip77twpt7qaxc

Revocation is a soft delete: the key stops working, the row stays, and its usage history keeps its subject. A running server keeps accepting a revoked key until its cache expires — auth.cache_ttl, 30 seconds by default. That is the price of keeping the database off the request path, and it is the number to lower if you need revocation to bite faster.

Passwords

People change their own from /profile. It asks for the current one — a session is what someone gets from a borrowed laptop, and the password is what they do not have — and it signs every other browser out, which is the point if they are changing it because something went wrong.

There is no self-service reset, because this gateway sends no email and a reset link with nowhere to send it is not a reset. When someone loses theirs:

llmgw users reset-password usr-k4mq… --password "a temporary passphrase" --store …

Tell them out of band and have them change it from their profile. Their sessions are closed — if they lost the password, the reason might be that someone else has it. Their API keys keep working; those are separate credentials.

Seeing the cluster

The dashboard — nodes, replicas, models, why something did not get placed, usage per key — is served twice, and the difference matters.

On the admin listener (127.0.0.1:9090 by default) it needs no authentication: having a shell on the machine is the credential.

ssh -L 9090:127.0.0.1:9090 <control-plane>   # then http://127.0.0.1:9090/

That listener also serves pprof, which can dump the process heap — where API keys sit in plaintext. Never expose that port. It is bound to loopback for that reason.

On the client-facing port the same page is at /admin, behind a session and an admin flag, so it can be reached from a browser without the port carrying pprof along with it:

llmgw users promote usr-k4mq… --store …

Someone without the flag gets a 404 rather than a 403, because 403 confirms the page exists. The dashboard is read-only in both places: everything that changes the cluster or issues a credential stays on the CLI, which keeps the worst case of a stolen admin cookie to "saw the cluster".

What this does not do

• No email. No approval notice, no self-service password reset, no address verification. The loop is manual on purpose at this size; if it stops being the right size, that is the thing to automate.
• No SSO. Accounts are local, with local passwords.
• No roles. There is one flag, is_admin, and it grants looking at the dashboard. Everything else an administrator does is the CLI, and having a shell here is what makes someone one.
• Rate limits are per gateway instance. With two instances each counts its own, so the effective limit doubles. v1 is single-instance by design.