Concepts
Slipway uses one vocabulary everywhere: in the UI, the API, the CLI and the database. Learn these nouns and the rest of the docs read easily.
Organisation └─ Project ├─ Pipeline ──▶ Run ──▶ Job ──▶ Step │ └─ produces ─▶ Artifact, and optionally a Release ├─ Service ──▶ Release (immutable) ──▶ Deployment ◀── Environment └─ Environment ── Infrastructure, Variables, Protection rules| Concept | One-line definition | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Organisation | The tenant. Owns users, projects, runners, secrets, billing. | Organisations and projects |
| Project | A container for pipelines, services and environments. | Organisations and projects |
| Pipeline | A definition (YAML) discovered from a repository or stored inline. | Pipelines and runs |
| Run | One execution of a pipeline. Contains jobs, which contain steps. | Pipelines and runs |
| Runner | An agent that executes jobs. Belongs to a pool; dials out. | Runners |
| Service | A deployable unit: image, Helm chart, serverless package, VM artefact, Terraform module. | Services and environments |
| Environment | A place a service runs: dev, staging, prod. Carries protection rules and variables. | Services and environments |
| Release | An immutable snapshot of artefact versions, variables and provenance. | Releases and deployments |
| Deployment | A release applied to an environment with a strategy. | Releases and deployments |
Identifiers
Section titled “Identifiers”Every object has a ULID with a type prefix so you can tell what an ID refers to: org_, proj_, pipe_, run_, job_, step_, rel_, dep_, env_, svc_, user_, tok_, rnr_, sec_, int_. IDs are 26-character Crockford base32 after the prefix, lexicographically sortable by creation time.
Events
Section titled “Events”Everything that happens is an event: run.started, run.finished, job.queued, deployment.waiting_approval, deployment.succeeded, release.created, runner.offline. Events drive notifications, outbound webhooks, the audit log and metering. See Webhooks and events.
The one idea
Section titled “The one idea”Most tools treat “build” and “deploy” as separate products joined by scripts. In Slipway a pipeline’s output is a release, and a release is the only thing a deployment ever applies. That gives you provenance (which commit, which run, which attestations) for everything that is running, and one audit trail from commit to production.