Glossary

Environment

Represents the current configuration and status of any running services in the project, which may be inspected and modified via the Garden CLI's environment command.

Several named environment configurations may be defined (e.g. dev, testing, ...) in the project's garden.yml.

Module

The unit of building in Garden. A module is defined by its garden.yml configuration file, located in the module's top-level directory.

Each module has a plugin type, and may define one or more services.

Essentially, a project is organized into modules at the granularity of its build steps. A module's build step may depend on one or more other modules having already been built, as specified in its garden.yml, in which case those modules will be built first, and their build output made available to the requiring module's build step.

Project

The top-level unit of organization in Garden. A project consists of one or more modules, along with a project-level garden.yml configuration file.

Garden CLI commands are run in the context of a project, and are aware of all its configuration, modules and services.

Provider

An implementation of a plugin type (e.g. local-kubernetes for the container plugin).

Whenever "a module's type" is mentioned in the documentation, what's meant is "which provider will handle this module?" Providers are responsible for implementing a module type's behaviors—e.g. how to build, deploy or test the module. Providers need to be specified for all the module types used in the project.

For example, both the local-kubernetes and kubernetes providers (kubernetes is the provider for remote Kubernetes) implement the container module type, but they handle deployments differently. local-kubernetes deploys to a local cluster, where kubernetes deploys to a remote cluster.

For a comprehensive list of providers available in Garden, check out the References

Service

The unit of deployment in Garden. Services are defined in their parent module's garden.yml, each exposing one or more ingress endpoints.

Services may depend on services defined in other modules, in which case those services will be deployed first, and their deployment output made available to the requiring service's deploy step.