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Sharing and access

Access is between two people and points one way at a time: someone can reach a machine of yours, or you can reach a machine of theirs. This page covers how access starts, how to see who has it, and how to end it.

What access controls

A machine serves only the people it was shared with and, if its owner joined a group (one an organization runs or one anyone can join), that group's members. Your requests reach your own machines, machines someone shared with you, and, if you joined such a group, the machines of the people in it. There is no other path between a stranger's machine and yours.

Each direction is a separate act by the person whose machine it is. Being given access does not give access back, and asking someone for access does not offer them yours.

Accepting an offer

When someone offers you access, they send you an invitation link. See what it offers first, without answering it:

saylek sharing preview <invitation>

Then accept it:

saylek sharing accept <invitation>

Either form you were sent works: the saylek.com link, or the <id>:<token> pair. Treat it as a secret, because anyone holding it can act on it.

Accepting is the consent. Once you have accepted, requests your own machine cannot serve may run on the other person's GPU by default. Read Privacy and egress before you accept on a machine that handles sensitive work.

Offering access to someone

saylek sharing invite --note "Rana, from the workshop" --email them@example.com

That sends the invitation to the address, and it can be accepted once. To get a link you pass on yourself instead:

saylek sharing invite --note "Lab, autumn term" --link --uses 5

--note is required, and only you see it. --uses (1 to 100) works only with --link; leave it off for a link that admits one person. An invitation lasts 24 hours unless you pass --expires with a duration such as 7d, 24h or 90m, and 7 days is the longest. See Invite flow for the whole picture.

Seeing who has access

saylek sharing list

It shows, separately, the people who may use your machines and the people whose models you may use. --direction you-share-with or --direction shared-with-me reads only one. A direction that could not be read is reported as unknown, never as nobody.

Ending someone's access

saylek sharing revoke --person <name>

Name them the way saylek sharing list shows them. If two people share that name, it refuses and prints their ids rather than guessing. It ends one direction only: anything of theirs you use is untouched. You can offer access again later with a new invitation.

An invitation you sent and nobody has accepted yet still works until it expires. There is no saylek sharing command that cancels one, so if a link has spread further than you meant, let it expire and send shorter-lived ones with --expires.

Giving up access you were given

saylek sharing stop-using --person <name>

It ends one direction only: what you share with them is untouched, and they are not asked to stop sharing. You can accept a new offer from them later.

Each of these asks before it changes anything. Without a terminal, pass the word it asks for: --confirm accept, --confirm remove or --confirm stop. --plan shows what would change and changes nothing.

Giving up the last one does not stop Saylek routing a request your machine cannot serve: it can still run on another machine of your own, or in a group you joined (leave one with saylek circles leave <id>; saylek circles list shows the id). With neither, it is refused rather than sent somewhere else. To keep requests on your machine, use local-only mode, covered on Privacy and egress. None of this touches a proxy upstream you configured yourself.

For pausing or deleting your whole account instead, see Common commands.

Next steps

Last checked 2026-09-24 · read as markdown at /docs/sharing-and-access.md