How does Linkup work?

Linkup Sessions and Subdomains

Whenever you create a new linkup session, either for a local environment or for a preview environment, you will receive a unique linkup session name, which is a subdomain of your linkup domain.

For example, linkup start might give you a slim-gecko.example.com (local environment) subdomain. Or linkup preview might give you xyz123.example.com (preview environment) subdomain.

This linkup session name will be used to identify all of the requests that belong to that session.

Identifying Requests to Sessions

All requests that reach linkup go through an identification process to determine which session they belong to. Requests that can’t be identified are rejected as a precaution.

Request to session identification uses two methods:

• Common browser headers, primarily Referer.
• Opentelemetry tracing headers traceparent and tracestate.

For all requests you make within a linkup session, they will either come straight from the browser (identified by your linkup subdomain slim-ant.domain.com), or they will come from an underlying service.

Linkup will add opentelemetry tracing headers to all requests it receives, but you will likely need to propogate these headers through your services. Please refer to the OpenTelemetry documentation on how to do this for your specific language and framework.