Concepts

The terms used throughout the documentation.

Term	Meaning
Project	A directory with a hive.yml at its root and image directories below it. See Configure your project.
Image	A directory with an image.yml and a Dockerfile (or a Nix flake.nix). See Define your images.
Tag	A version of an image, e.g. 1.0.0. Each tag is built separately and can set its own versions.
Variant	A flavor of an image (e.g. -selenium) that layers on top of its tags.
Versions	Key/value pairs from image.yml passed to the build as <KEY>_VERSION build arguments.
__hive__/<image>:<tag>	The FROM reference to another image of the project. ContainerHive derives the build order from it.
dist/	Output of ch generate: rendered build contexts and configs. build, test and sbom work on it.
Build ID	Suffix (-build.<id>) appended to tags so merge request builds don't clash. See Build IDs.
Finalize	ch finalize creates multi-arch manifests and semantic version aliases in the registry.
Shard	A slice of the images or tests handled by one parallel CI job. See Sharding.

Typical flow

ch generate  →  ch build  →  ch test  →  ch sbom  →  ch finalize

See Build process overview for what happens in each step.