Reference
Glossary.
The vocabulary of a multi-tenant AI gateway, defined once. Every term here is also emitted as schema.org DefinedTerm JSON-LD for AI search.
- Tenant
- A namespace inside a single OpenClawMU gateway. It owns a directory on disk, a SHA-256-hashed token, a quota budget, channel pairings, and an optional config overlay. It's the unit you bill, snapshot, rotate credentials for, or delete.
- Gateway
- The single Node process that runs OpenClawMU. It exposes a JSON-RPC gateway (default 127.0.0.1:18789), a tenant-scoped HTTP API, and a control-plane HTTP API, and hosts every channel adapter, sandbox, and agent run.
- Tenant token
- The Bearer credential that authenticates a tenant. The plaintext token is shown once at creation; the gateway stores only its SHA-256 hash and verifies inbound tokens with a constant-time compare. Rotate it if it leaks.
- Dispatcher
- The gateway component that resolves the tenant from a request's token, then routes the JSON-RPC method to the correct per-tenant handler. It allow-lists 59 tenant-scoped methods and refuses to route to the wrong tenant.
- Sandbox
- An isolated execution environment the gateway spawns when an agent run needs to execute code. Two modes: bubblewrap (Linux, no root, lightweight) and Docker (full container for genuinely untrusted code). Chosen per workload.
- Quota
- A per-tenant limit enforced at the request boundary. Exceeding a quota returns a 429 with the next-window timestamp, so one tenant can't burn another tenant's — or your — LLM budget.
- Config overlay
- A per-tenant configuration file that can override tenant-scoped settings — model choice, max tokens, system prompt, allowed tools. Attempts to override admin-only keys (LLM credentials, rate card, S3 config) are rejected at load time.
- Admin-only key
- A configuration key that lives only in the gateway config and can never be set by a tenant overlay: downstream LLM API credentials, the billing rate card, S3 bucket credentials, and gateway-wide feature flags.
- Channel
- A messaging surface OpenClawMU bridges into the gateway — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, Matrix, LINE, Lark, Google Chat, and an embeddable WebChat widget. Credentials are isolated per tenant.
- Rate card
- The pricing table in the gateway config that turns per-tenant token counts into currency. The report generator multiplies usage by the rate card into per-period totals for billing.
- Backup / restore
- Snapshotting a tenant's directory to an S3-compatible bucket (AWS S3, MinIO, GCS, R2) and rehydrating it on any gateway. Both target and source paths are path-traversal hardened.
- Path-traversal hardening
- The practice of resolving every path input and asserting it stays inside the tenant root — rejecting `..` segments, absolute paths, and escaping symlinks. Applied to plugin loaders, file tools, sandbox mounts, and backup/restore paths.
- Control-plane API
- The admin HTTP API for managing gateway-wide resources — creating and deleting tenants, managing the rate card — that requires the admin key and never accepts a tenant token.
- Web terminal
- A browser terminal (xterm.js) attached to a per-tenant sandboxed shell, so an operator can inspect or drive a tenant's environment without SSH into the host.
EXFOLIATE!
See the vocabulary in action.
The isolation model, the token flow, and the dispatcher — walked end to end.