Your Workspace Is Being Set Up

Most products create a row in a database when you sign up. Leed creates a website. Behind the spinner on the Initializing screen it is standing up a git repository, two Cloudflare Workers, two hostnames, build automation, an email sending identity and a set of starter content, in that order, and wiring them to each other. That is why the screen says a couple of minutes and means it — and why what you land on afterwards is a working site rather than an empty shell.

The Initializing screen

The screen shows the Leed mark, the heading Initializing Data, a spinner, one line of status, and This could take a couple minutes… Leed checks progress every five seconds and moves you into the workspace by itself the moment setup completes.

The status line is the only part that changes:

What gets built

flowchart LR
    A["Identity<br/>user · workspace · organization"] --> B["Site repository<br/>main + staging"]
    B --> C["Two workers<br/>public + preview"]
    C --> D{"Two hostnames"}
    D --> D1["your-domain.com"]
    D --> D2["staging.your-domain.com"]
    D1 --> E["Build automation<br/>triggers · build key · build events"]
    D2 --> E
    E --> F["Email identity<br/>+ Turnstile key"]
    F --> G["Billing record"]
    G --> H["Starter content"]
    H --> I["First build"]
    I --> J["Your workspace"]

    D -. "not live until you<br/>add a CNAME" .-> K["Custom domain<br/>inactive"]

Each stage below is one paragraph and one row of the table that follows it.

Your identity and workspace

Leed creates the CMS user for the address you verified, the workspace record that everything else hangs off, and the organization your login belongs to. The organization is created under the placeholder name Provisioning... and is renamed to your site title as the last part of the seeding step — if you catch the workspace name looking wrong for a moment, that is what you are seeing.

Your user is created as an Administrator.

Your site repository

A git repository is created for your site and populated with the template set, styles and generated data files that the site builder reads. It has a main branch and a protected staging branch, which is the split that later becomes your live site and your preview site.

Two workers and two hostnames

Two Cloudflare Workers are created — one for the public site, one for the preview site — and two custom hostnames are registered, one for the domain you typed and one for staging. in front of it. Edge routes are added so traffic for either hostname reaches the right worker.

Build automation

A build trigger is created for each worker, plus an API key the build uses to report back to Leed, plus a subscription to Cloudflare’s build events so Leed learns when a build starts, succeeds, fails or is canceled. This is the machinery that turns “publish” into a deployed page later on.

Email and spam protection

A sending identity is created for your domain, so mail your site sends comes from you rather than from Leed, and a Turnstile key is issued for your site’s forms. The preview site gets a permanently-passing test key instead, so a challenge never blocks you while you are reviewing work.

Billing

A subscription record is created so billing has something to attach to. Your workspace opens on the Free tier with the free entitlements stamped on it; there is nothing to enter and no countdown running. What each paid rung adds, and how the free plan relates to trials, is on Free Plan and Trials.

Starter content

The seed step: labels, page types, the template set, a protected system form, a template page and one real page. It is enumerated in full in the next section.

The first build

Finally Leed kicks off an initial build, so there is something at your URL by the time you arrive rather than a blank page.

The starter content you land on

Your workspace is not empty. Seeding creates:

All of it is yours. Rename it, restructure it, delete what you do not want. The two labels and the Documentation MCP form are locked because other parts of Leed depend on them, but the page types and the pages are ordinary content.

Those four page types are the shapes your content can take, and choosing between them is the first real modeling decision you will make — Page Types explains what each one changes. My first blog is a real page rather than a placeholder: open it and start typing, and Managing Pages shows the tree it lives in. If you came to Leed to write documentation, the Documentation page type is where that starts — What a Documentation Set Is is the next thing to read.

Nothing you write is public until you publish it. How Publishing Works is the one concept worth reading before your first edit.

Your first URL

Your site is live immediately — on a *.leed.workers.dev address, not on your domain. Leed enables that address deliberately so you have somewhere to look before any DNS exists. You will find it on the Deploy screen.

The same is true of staging.<your-domain> for the preview site.

You are the Administrator

If something goes wrong

If the status line reads Something went wrong. Please contact support., setup stopped part-way. Contact support with the address you signed up with and the domain you entered; there is nothing to retry from your side, and creating a second account on another address makes the situation harder to fix rather than easier.

Reloading the Initializing screen is safe. Setup is keyed on your workspace, so re-running it picks up where it left off rather than building a second workspace — you cannot end up with duplicates by refreshing, closing the tab or coming back tomorrow.

You can also arrive at this screen long after signing up. Leed sends you here whenever your workspace has no domain recorded on it, which is the state a half-finished setup leaves behind. If you land on Initializing days later and the status line stays put, that is the same case as an outright failure: it is one for support, not for another refresh.

Where you land when it finishes

When the status line reaches All done! Redirecting…, Leed takes you into the workspace and drops you on Know, the dashboard. Touring the Workspace names the rail and everything on it.

The site title and domain you typed at sign-up are both editable from General Site Settings — though the domain is the identity your workspace was provisioned under, so changing it is a larger move than changing the title.