Vocabulary

Before delving deeper into the complicated world of containers and their runners, I want to make sure you and I are on the same page about the meaning of some words.

Each of the items below is a word which I define for the purposes of this manual. They may have different definitions outside of this manual.

• denv: a shortening of "development environment" and is used to refer to both the command that is being documented here denv and the environment that the command spawns when run successfully. Generally, you should read it as the environment when it is an improper noun (i.e. preceded by an article like "the" or "a") and the command otherwise. An overly convoluted example is "The denv is created by running denv.". The first use refers to the spawned environment and the second refers to the command. In this manual, I try to represent "denv" as code when it refers to the command.
  • Pronunciation: Personally, I have always pronounced "denv" as "d/ea/nv" but many folks I collaborate with read it as "dee-/ea/nv".
• container: while not technically correct, I usually think of containers as light-weight virtual machines (VMs). This gets the point across that they have a different environment and can contain software that couldn't run on the host.
• image: the data that can be used to launch a container with specific software in it. Usually, images consist of layers which are created by running different commands within the image during the build process.
  • Look into Developing the Environment to learn more about building images for use with denv in mind.
• workspace: the special directory containing all of the files that are being worked on. This is simply a shorthand for this special directory and can, for most use cases, map pretty cleanly to the "repository root directory" or (if you are using git), the directory that contains the hidden directory .git.
• runner: a program that uses a image to start up a container with which the user can interact. In this project, I use "container runner" and "container manager" interchangeably even though they aren't technically the same. The requirements on a "runner" to be a backend for denv are defined in Adding a new Runner.