Glossary

The canonical term for each concept, used consistently across these docs. Where a concept has a fuller treatment, the definition links to it.

Sites & content

Site — a named project boatramp serves. The unit that owns domains, config, and deployments.

Deployment — an immutable published version of a site’s content, identified by a content hash. A deployment is created, then activated; it never changes in place.

Activation — flipping a site’s current pointer to a deployment, making it the live one. The reverse is a rollback (activating an earlier deployment).

Current — the deployment a site serves by default. One per site.

Manifest — the path→hash map that defines a deployment’s content, plus its folded-in routing config.

Blob — the content-addressed bytes of one file, stored once and referenced by hash. Identical files across deployments share a blob.

Alias — a named pointer to a deployment besides current (e.g. staging), used for previews and opt-in background work.

Preview — a deployment served by its id at /_deploy/<id> before (or instead of) activation. The id is an unguessable content hash.

Compute

Handler — a WebAssembly component bound to a route, run in an in-process sandbox. See the compute model.

Component — a wasm32-wasip2 WebAssembly component: the artifact a handler, consumer, or stream runs.

Consumer — a message-triggered handler, invoked once per message on a topic.

Cron — a scheduled invocation of a handler route.

Stream — a host-level SSE or WebSocket endpoint that fans out messaging topics to connected clients.

Import — a host capability a handler requests (wasi:keyvalue, sql, …), granted only if the site’s allowlist permits it.

Compute (workload) — container or microVM execution, distinct from an in-process handler. Needs KVM on the host. See Run compute workloads.

Routing & serving

The gateway — the reverse proxy and load balancer that publishes private upstream services through a site. See Expose a private service.

Request pipeline — the fixed ordered stages every served request runs through. See The request pipeline.

Security posture — the operator profile (multi-tenant / single-tenant / dev) plus overrides that set the security defaults. See Security posture.

Control plane & auth

Control plane — the authenticated management API (publishing, config, tokens). Distinct from public content serving, which is unauthenticated. See the API reference.

Token — a signed, offline-verifiable credential (COSE_Sign1 over a CWT) that carries granted roles. See Authentication & authorization.

Role / action / resource / right — the RBAC vocabulary. A role expands to rights; a right is an action on a resource, optionally site-scoped.

Signer — the seam that holds the token signing key: a local key, a cloud KMS, Vault, or a PKCS#11 HSM. See external signer.

Delegation / attenuation — narrowing a token offline into a further-scoped child, with no server round-trip. A child can only add restrictions.

Storage & topology

Storage / KvStore — the two backend seams: Storage for blobs, KvStore for metadata. Swapping either swaps a backend without changing the CLI. See Deployment topologies.

Node — one boatramp serve process.

Cluster — a set of nodes replicating the control plane over Raft.

Voter / learner — a Raft node that counts toward quorum (voter) or serves local reads and forwards writes without voting (learner).

Mesh — the raw-public-key mutual-TLS network between cluster nodes. See cluster mesh certificates.