Glossary¶

Plain-language decoder for the technical terms used elsewhere in this repo. If a term in any doc isn't here, please add it.

Hosting & infrastructure¶

VPS (Virtual Private Server): a rented slice of a physical computer in a data centre. Cheaper than a full server, isolated from other tenants.
Bare VM / bare metal: a single server (physical or virtual) running our software directly, with no orchestrator on top.
Container: a self-contained, portable software bundle. Like a shipping container — same package runs anywhere.
Docker: the most common tool for running containers.
Orchestrator: software that decides which containers run where and restarts them when they fail. Examples we use: Portainer, Dokploy.
Portainer: a web dashboard for managing Docker containers across one or more hosts.
Dokploy: a self-hosted "platform-as-a-service" — push code, it builds + deploys it. Similar to Heroku/Vercel, but on our own servers.
Watchtower: automation that watches for new versions of our containers and updates them.
Reverse proxy: a piece of software that sits in front of our apps and routes incoming web traffic to the right one (also handles HTTPS). Common ones: Traefik, Caddy, Nginx.
TLS / SSL certificate: what makes the padlock appear in the browser. Encrypts traffic between user and app. Let's Encrypt issues them for free; commercial CAs charge.

Public IP: the internet-reachable address of a server. Anyone can attempt to connect.
Private / internal IP: an address only reachable from inside our own network.
Wireguard: the VPN we use. When connected, your laptop is "inside" our private network and can reach internal-only services.
Port: a numbered door on a server. 443 is HTTPS, 22 is SSH, 5432 is PostgreSQL, etc.
DNS: the phonebook that maps names like parallax.projecteidos.com to IP addresses.

SSO (Single Sign-On): log in once, get into multiple apps. We use Authentik for this.
Authentik: our SSO/identity provider. It's the thing apps trust to confirm "yes, this is Adam".
MFA / 2FA: multi-factor / two-factor authentication. A second proof beyond a password (authenticator app, security key).
Vault (HashiCorp Vault): our secret-storage system at vault.448.global. All passwords, API keys, and certificates should live here, not in code or .env files.
API key / token: a long random string that acts as a password for one app to talk to another.

Repo (repository): a folder of source code tracked by Git.
GitLab: our self-hosted version of GitHub at git.projecteidos.com. Stores code, runs CI/CD pipelines.
CI/CD: Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment. Automation that runs tests on every code change and deploys passing builds.
Pipeline: the sequence of automated steps a code change goes through (test → build → deploy).
Dependency: a third-party software library our code relies on.

Database: structured storage for our application data. Common types: PostgreSQL (relational), MySQL (relational), Oracle (relational, enterprise), MongoDB (document), Redis (key-value/cache).
Object storage: dumb storage for files (images, videos, backups). We use MinIO at s3.448.global, which speaks the same language as Amazon S3.
PII (Personally Identifiable Information): any data that can identify a person — names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, government IDs.
Backup: a copy of data taken at a point in time, stored separately, so we can recover if the primary is lost or corrupted.
Restore test: actually using a backup to bring data back. A backup that has never been restored is not yet proven to work.

SPOF (Single Point of Failure): a component whose failure brings down a service. Eliminating SPOFs is core to "professional-grade" operation.
High Availability (HA): designed so the system survives the loss of any one component without downtime.
DR (Disaster Recovery): the plan and tooling to restore service after a major incident (data centre fire, ransomware, etc.).
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): how long we're willing to be down. "Our RTO is 4 hours" means within 4 hours of an outage we expect to be running again.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective): how much data we're willing to lose. "Our RPO is 1 hour" means we accept losing up to 1 hour of recent data.
SLO / SLA: Service Level Objective (internal target) / Service Level Agreement (contractual promise). E.g. "99.9% uptime".
Incident: an unplanned event that degrades or breaks a service.
Runbook: a written, step-by-step procedure for handling a specific problem.
Maturity (hobby / trial / professional): our internal label for how production-ready an app is.
Hobby: runs because someone set it up once. No backups, no monitoring, single host, manual everything.
Trial: monitored, has some backups, but unverified, with manual recovery.
Professional: redundant, monitored, alerted, backed up and restore-tested, deploy automated, secrets in Vault, owner identified, runbook exists.

Product	What it is
Authentik	SSO / identity provider
Beszel	Lightweight server-monitoring dashboard
Coder	Web-based developer environments
Dokploy	Self-hosted PaaS — git-push deploys
Draw.io	Web-based diagramming tool
GitLab	Source control + CI/CD
Gotify	Self-hosted push-notification server
HashiCorp Vault	Secret store
IT Tools	Bundle of small developer/sysadmin utilities
MinIO	S3-compatible object storage
n8n	Visual workflow automation (like Zapier, self-hosted)
Open WebUI	Web chat front-end for self-hosted LLMs
Oracle APEX	Low-code database-app platform from Oracle
PeerTube	Self-hosted video platform (likely what powers PE Tube)
Portainer	Docker container management UI
SQLcl	Oracle's command-line SQL client
Watchtower	Automatic container-image updater
WireGuard	Modern VPN protocol
WordPress	The most-used content management system on the web