How Areca Uses the Linear API

Authentication

Areca uses Linear's official OAuth 2.0 flow. Users explicitly authorize Areca with read and write scopes. Access tokens are refreshed automatically using Linear's token endpoint. Users can revoke access at any time from their Linear settings.

What We Read

We fetch only what's needed to display and manage a user's own work:

• Assigned issues — title, priority, due date, status, labels, and parent/child relationships
• Workflow states — names, colors, and types for the user's teams
• Labels — names, colors, and team associations

We do not access issue descriptions, comments, attachments, other users' issues, or workspace-wide analytics.

What We Write

Users can update their own issues from within Areca:

• Priority
• Status
• Due date
• Labels
• Title

All updates are made as the authenticated user (not as an application actor), so changes appear in Linear as if the user made them directly.

How We Sync

Areca uses background polling — not webhooks — to keep issue data current.

Only the authenticated user's assigned issues are fetched. We use cursor-based pagination and request only the fields we need.

Rate Limiting

We actively track and respect Linear's rate limits:

• We read X-RateLimit response headers after every request
• We check remaining quota before making requests
• We use exponential backoff on transient errors
• We honor Retry-After headers when rate-limited
• We deduplicate concurrent syncs to avoid redundant requests

Our per-user request volume is well within Linear's 5,000 requests/hour limit.

Data Storage

We cache issue, label, and workflow state data in our own database to reduce API calls and provide fast load times. This cache is:

• Per-user — each user's data is isolated
• Scoped — limited to the fields listed above
• Refreshed regularly — stale data is replaced on each sync cycle
• Cleaned up — issues no longer assigned to the user are removed during sync

We store Linear OAuth tokens securely in our database. We do not share, sell, or expose any Linear data to third parties.

Terms of Service Compliance

Areca complies with Linear's Terms of Service:

• Not a competing product — Areca is a personal scheduling tool, not a project management platform
• No reverse engineering — we use only the public GraphQL API as documented
• No reselling — Linear data is used solely to serve the authenticated user
• Minimal data access — we request only the scopes and fields we need
• User-controlled — users authorize access via OAuth and can revoke it at any time

Questions

If you have questions about how Areca uses the Linear API, please contact us at [email protected].