The EiffelEnvironmentDefinedEvent declares an environment which may be referenced from other events in order to secure traceability to the conditions under which an artifact was created or a test was executed. Depending on the technology domain, the nature of an environment varies greatly however: it may be a virtual image, a complete mechatronic system of millions of independent parts, or anything in between. Consequently, a concise yet complete and generic syntax for describing any environment is futile.
From Eiffel's point of view, however, the prioritized concern is not description of the environment, but rather unambiguous identification of it. Consequently, the EiffelEnvironmentDefinedEvent syntax offers several alternatives to be selected from depending on the use case at hand: an environment may be described using data.image, data.host or data.uri, or a RUNTIME_ENVIRONMENT link to another event that provides a more comprehensive description. Unless a link of the latter kind is used exactly one of these properties SHOULD be included in any one event. In certain situations where an actual description of the environment is deemed redundant or its nature is implicit, the event MAY be used without any of these properties or a RUNTIME_ENVIRONMENT link; it should be noted, however, that explicit practices are always encouraged over implicit ones.
Type: String
Required: Yes
Description: The name of the environment.
Type: String
Required: No
Description: The version of the environment, if any. This is in a sense redundant, as relationships between environments can be tracked via the PREVIOUS_VERSION link type, but can be used for improved clarity and semantics.
Type: String
Required: No
Description: A string identifying e.g. a Docker image that defines this environment. Use of this member is discouraged. Prefer using the less ambiguous RUNTIME_ENVIRONMENT link type.
Type: Object
Required: No
Description: An object identifying a host. This object is included for pragmatic reasons, as this method of environment identification is often used in practice. It is discouraged, however, as it is highly unreliable both in terms of consistency and traceability. Consistency because consecutive executions on the same host may produce different results, as there are no inherent guarantees that it will stay the same over time. Traceability because when analyzing the historical record you want a static description of the environment as it was at the time of execution, not a pointer to a dynamic entity which may or may not have changed since then (and may or may not have changed again the next time you inspect it).
Type: String
Required: Yes
Description: The hostname.
Type: String
Required: Yes
Description: The user name on the host.
Type: String
Required: No
Description: A URI identifying the environment description. This is the catch-all method of environment descriptions. Eiffel does not concern itself with the format or nature of the description, but merely points to its location.
This section describes which link types are valid for this event type. For details on how to express the link objects themselves see The Links Object.
Required: No
Legal targets: Any
Multiple allowed: Yes
Description: Identifies a cause of the event occurring. SHOULD not be used in conjunction with CONTEXT: individual events providing CAUSE within a larger context gives rise to ambiguity. It is instead recommended to let the root event of the context declare CAUSE.
Required: No
Legal targets: EiffelActivityTriggeredEvent, EiffelTestSuiteStartedEvent
Multiple allowed: No
Description: Identifies the activity or test suite of which this event constitutes a part.
Required: No
Legal targets: EiffelFlowContextDefinedEvent
Multiple allowed: Yes
Description: Identifies the flow context of the event: which is the continuous integration and delivery flow in which this occurred – e.g. which product, project, track or version this is applicable to.
Required: No
Legal targets: EiffelEnvironmentDefinedEvent
Multiple allowed: Yes
Description: Identifies a latest previous version (there may be more than one in case of merges) of the environment.
Required: No
Legal targets: EiffelArtifactCreatedEvent, EiffelCompositionDefinedEvent
Multiple allowed: Yes
Description: Identifies a description of a runtime environment within which an activity has taken place. The target event could e.g. identify a Docker image, a JVM distribution archive, or a composition of operating system packages that were installed on the host system. This link type has the same purpose as the data.image member but allows richer and less ambiguous descriptions.
Type: String
Format: UUID
Required: Yes
Description: The unique identity of the event, generated at event creation.
Type: String
Format: An event type name
Required: Yes
Description: The type of event. This field is required by the recipient of the event, as each event type has a specific meaning and a specific set of members in the data and links objects.
Type: String
Format: Semantic Versioning 2.0.0
Required: Yes
Description: The version of the event type. This field is required by the recipient of the event to interpret the contents. Please see Versioning for more information.
Type: Integer
Format: UNIX Epoch time, in milliseconds.
Required: Yes
Description: The event creation timestamp.
Type: String[]
Format: Free text
Required: No
Description: Any tags or keywords associated with the events, for searchability purposes.
Type: Object
Required: No
Description: A description of the source of the event. This object is primarily for traceability purposes, and while optional, some form of identification of the source is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. It offers multiple methods of identifying the source of the event, techniques which may be select from based on the technology domain and needs in any particular use case.
Type: String
Format: Free text
Required: No
Description: Identifies the domain that produced an event.
Type: String
Format: Hostname
Required: No
Description: The hostname of the event sender.
Type: String
Format: Free text
Required: No
Description: The name of the event sender.
Type: String
Format: purl specification
Required: No
Description: The identity of the serializer software used to construct the event, in purl format.
Type: String
Format: URI
Required: No
Description: The URI of, related to or describing the event sender.
Type: Object
Required: No
Description: An optional object for enclosing security related information, particularly supporting data integrity. See Security for further information.
Type: String
Format: Distinguished Name
Required: Yes
Description: The identity of the author of the event. This property is intended to enable the recipient to identify the author of the event contents and/or look up the appropriate public key for decrypting the meta.security.integrityProtection.signature value and thereby verifying author identity and data integrity.
Type: Object
Required: No
Description: An optional object for enabling information integrity protection via cryptographic signing. To generate a correct meta.security.integrityProtection object:
- Generate the entire event, but with the meta.security.integrityProtection.signature value set to an empty string.
- Serialize the event on Canonical JSON Form.
- Generate the signature using the meta.security.integrityProtection.alg algorithm.
- Set the meta.security.integrityProtection.signature value to the resulting signature while maintaining Canonical JSON Form. To verify the integrity of the event, the consumer then resets meta.security.integrityProtection.signature to an empty string and ensures Canonical JSON Form before verifying the signature.
Type: String
Required: Yes
Description: The signature produced by the signing algorithm.
Type: String
Format: A valid JWA RFC 7518 alg parameter value, excluding "none"
Required: Yes
Description: The cryptographic algorithm used to digitally sign the event. If no signing is performed, the meta.security.integrityProtection SHALL be omitted rather than setting meta.security.integrityProtection.alg to "none".
Type: String
Required: No
Description: The producer of the event may include the relevant public key for convenience, rather than relying a separate key distribution mechanism. Note that this property, along with the rest of the event, is encompassed by the integrity protection offered via meta.security.integrityProtection.
Type: Object[]
Required: No
Description: An optional object for enabling verification of intact event sequences in a distributed environment, thereby protecting against data loss, race conditions and replay attacks. It allows event publishers to state the order in which they produce a certain set of events. In other words, it cannot provide any global guarantees as to event sequencing, but rather per-publisher guarantees. Every object in the array represents a named sequence of which this event forms a part. For every event including a given named sequence, the publisher SHALL increment meta.security.sequenceProtection.position by 1. The first event produced in a given named sequence SHALL numbered 1.
Type: String
Required: Yes
Description: The name of the sequence. There MUST not be two identical meta.security.sequenceProtection.sequenceName values in the same event.
Type: Integer
Required: Yes
Description: The number of the event within the named sequence.
Type: String
Format: URI
Required: No
Description: A URI pointing at a location from where the schema used when creating this event can be retrieved. It can be used to parse event data for validation and extraction purposes, for example. Note, that the schema on that URI should be considered immutable.
| Version | Introduced in | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| 4.0.0 | Not yet released in an edition | Update meta schema to Draft 2020-12 and add link validation. |
| 3.3.0 | edition-arica | Add schema URL to the meta object (see Issue 280). |
| 3.2.0 | edition-lyon | Add links.domainId member (see Issue 233). |
| 3.1.0 | edition-lyon | Added RUNTIME_ENVIRONMENT link type. |
| 3.0.0 | edition-agen | Improved information integrity protection (see Issue 185). |
| 2.0.0 | edition-agen | Introduced purl identifiers instead of GAVs (see Issue 182) |
| 1.1.0 | edition-toulouse | Multiple links of type FLOW_CONTEXT allowed. |
| 1.0.0 | edition-bordeaux | Initial version. |