Connecting a service

Open a service from the sidebar and choose Connect. What happens next depends on how the service authenticates — there are three paths.

Browser sign-in (most services)

A login window opens showing the service's own sign-in page, plus a thin Butin toolbar (the live URL, a Copy button, and a Capture session button).

1. Sign in by hand — password, MFA, SSO redirect, email link. Butin never sees or stores your password; it only keeps the resulting session.
2. Automatic capture — when the page settles on your logged-in home, Butin grabs the session, encrypts it, and closes the window.
3. Manual capture — some services land somewhere Butin can't auto-detect. Once you're clearly logged in, click Capture session in the toolbar.

The session is stored encrypted (via your OS secure storage) under ~/butin. It persists across restarts, so you normally only do this once per session lifetime — see How it works → sessions expire.

Pasted token / manual fields

A few services need an extra value that isn't a cookie — a token you copy from the page, or a value you paste in. When that's the case, the connect flow shows a field for it alongside the login.

Key-based services (no login)

Some services don't use a browser session at all — they authenticate with an access key or named profile (AWS is the classic example). For these, Connect opens a small configuration form instead of a login window: fill in the required values and save. Here, "connected" simply means the form is filled in correctly.

When the session expires

Sessions lapse on the service's own clock. When one does, the service shows as disconnected — open it and Reconnect to sign in again. Your already-downloaded data is untouched. See Connection health.