The model
the account
The customer account and billing boundary. Owns people, the subscription, and every Environment.
One person’s account can belong to several. Always has at least one Owner.
the isolation boundary
Sandbox, staging or production. Nothing moves between them and nothing auto-promotes. Named by a
URL slug. Owns the
latest cache lifetime. See Environments.the defaults
A default token set, plus its integrations, serving mode, signing keys and allowlists. Belongs to
one Environment; an Environment may hold many. See Tokens.
one brand
A flat map of token path to value — the values that make one brand different. Owns values and
nothing else. See Variants.
Tokens
a named value
A design value with a path, a type and a value:
color.brand.primary, color, #5B4DE4.the format
The W3C Design Tokens Community Group format:
$value, $type, $description, $extensions,
nested in groups. What a Theme’s document is.a folder with opinions
A node in the tree. A group’s
$type is inherited by every descendant that declares none —
which is why you must never copy it onto the token.{a.reference}
A value of the form
{color.brand}. Stored unresolved, so the relationship survives — override the
target and everything pointing at it moves. Resolved when files are rendered.what it actually is
A token’s type after group inheritance and inference. Read-only, and distinct from the token’s own
$type.the overlay
The Theme’s document with a Variant’s values overlaid, path by path. Only
$value changes — the
tree, names, types and descriptions are the Theme’s throughout.Versioning
unpublished edits
Created by the first edit that changes something, deleted when you publish or discard. “Is there a
draft” and “are there unpublished changes” are the same question.
frozen, forever
An immutable snapshot, numbered from 1. Nothing in Livry can write an existing version.
freeze and build
Turns the draft into the next version, migrates the Variants, and materialises the served files.
See Versioning.
the build step
Rendering every (Theme, Variant, version) into its served files. Runs a few seconds behind a
publish.
Serving
a served file
One of
tokens.css, tokens.json, tokens.flat.json, tokens.dtcg.json, tokens.values.json.
See What gets served.a framework and library pair
e.g. (React, Chakra UI). Decides which files a Theme builds. Not a label — a Theme with no
integrations serves nothing.
public or signed
Whether URLs need an HMAC signature. New Themes are
public.public
Names which signing key a URL was signed with. Travels in
?kid=. Not a secret.two addresses
latest moves when you publish and expires on a timer; /{n}/ is frozen and cached for a year.
See Caching.Access
Member / Billing / Admin / Owner
What you can do to the account. Grants nothing inside an Environment.
Viewer / Editor / Admin
What you can do inside one Environment. Held per Environment, per person. See
Roles.
Words that are not concepts
Earlier versions of Livry used these. They appear in old blog posts, old screenshots and occasionally in our own code comments. None of them is part of the product.If you find one of these in current Livry documentation, a portal screen or an API response, that
is a bug worth reporting — the vocabulary is meant to be exact everywhere.