In this section you will find explanations of terms we use to refer to various concepts in the Autostrap environment.

project-config

project-config is a Git repository that contains configuration specific to a given project. It complements and overrides Autostrap's default configuration in the global-config repository. For reference on its structure and semantics we provide an example project-config repository. Feel free to fork this repository and use it as a base for your own project-config repository.

topic

A topic is a self-contained unit of default configuration from the global-config repository. It has a topic name (henceforth referred to by the placeholder 'name') and consists of the following directories in global-config/puppet/hieradata:

classes.d/name	This directory typically contains a file named classes.yaml which holds the Hiera array classes. The elements of this array are all the puppet classes required to deploy the topic in question.
config.d/name	This directory contains all configuration data required by this topic. This configuration can be overriden partially or completely by the configuration in a project-config repository.
repos.d/name	This directory contains puppet-repodeploy configuration specifying the repositories to be checked out when deploying the topic in question. Commonly these repositories are puppet modules required for deployment.

Topics can be deployed using masterless Puppet or by by adding it to a Puppet master's configuration. If a topic is deployed to a node in masterless fashion, all the YAML files in the abovementioned directories are added to this node's hiera.yaml. If it is added to the Puppet master's list of topics, only its config.d and repos.d subdirectories will be added to the Puppet master's hiera.yaml. Class declarations for nodes/node types will have to be configured on a per-node/nodetype basis.