Glossary
This glossary is intended to be a comprehensive, standardized list of Expeditor terminology. It includes technical terms that are specific to Expeditor, as well as more general terms that provide useful context.
Action
A reference to a discrete unit of logic that contains the pattern for how to accomplish a specific task.
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Action Filter
A configuration element that can be applied to an action to indicate whether or not the action should be executed given the context of the workload to which it is responding.
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Action Set
A collection of one or more actions that are executed against a workload as part of a subscription.
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Agent (Expeditor)
The process inside Expeditor responsible for handling the runtime concerns of an Expeditor project.
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Agent (Buildkite)
The buildkite agent is a small, reliable and cross-platform build runner that makes it easy to run automated builds on your own infrastructure. Its main responsibilities are polling buildkite.com for work, running build jobs, reporting back the status code and output log of the job, and uploading the job’s artifacts.
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Agent ID
The globally unique identifier of an Expeditor agent. For GitHub repositories, they take the form <GITHUB_ORG>/<GITHUB_REPO>:<GITHUB_BRANCH> (e.g. chef/example:main).
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Build (Buildkite)
An execution instance of a Buildkite Pipeline made up of one or more jobs (i.e. when you run a pipeline, a build is created).
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Built-in (Action)
A built-in is a class of action that codifies a common, repeatable patterns that require minimal configuration and are is leveraged across a wide variety of projects.
Configuration (Expeditor Agent)
Project-specific configuration that is used to drive the behavior of the Expeditor agent. It is commonly kept in the .expeditor/config.yml file.
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Executor
An Expeditor-provided DSL in your Buildkite pipeline definition that encapsulates a variety of Buildkite configurations to ensure that your Buildkite job is executed in a consistent manner.
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Job (Buildkite)
The execution instance of a step in a pipeline (i.e. each of the steps in the pipeline end up as jobs in the build).
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Keyspace
A specific key-value pair in a large hash of key-value pairs in a YAML or other dictionary object.
---
expeditor: # the expeditor keyspace
defaults: # the expeditor.defaults keyspace
buildkite: # the expeditor.defaults.buildkite keyspaceNamed Pipeline
A Buildkite pipeline whose name indicates a convention surrounding how it should be created, managed, and used.
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Organization (GitHub)
A logical entity that contains a collection of related GitHub repositories.
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Organization (Buildkite)
A collection of Buildkite pipelines. At Chef, we have multiple organizations to segment public vs private pipelines.
Phase (Action Set)
Action sets are broken up into three phases: pre-commit, commit, and post-commit. An action can occur either in the pre-commit or post-commit phase.
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Pipeline (Buildkite)
A template of the steps you want to run. When you run a pipeline, a build is created. Each of the steps in the pipeline end up as jobs in the build.
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Pipeline Definition (Buildkite)
A YAML file that contains a list of steps that should be executed as part of a Buildkite build.
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Project (Expeditor)
The conceptual representation of a GitHub software project.
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Release Branch
The GitHub branch from which release artifacts are being produced.
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Shim Pipeline Definition
A configuration file (usually YAML), unique to a specific use case, that is processed by Expeditor into a complete Buildkite pipeline. These pipeline definition files are not supported by the native Buildkite DSL.
You can identify shim pipeline definitions by the identifying marker in the file name. General purpose pipeline definition files have a .pipeline.yml suffix while shim pipeline definition files will have a .<SHIM_TYPE>.yml suffix (e.g. release.omnibus.yml).
Step (Buildkite)
An individual unit of work defined in a Buildkite pipeline, which when executed as part of a Buildkite build is transformed into a job
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Subscription
An expression that defines what actions should be executed when an agent receives a workload.
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Workload
A collection of metadata representing the details of a event that occurred on an external system.
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