Glossary
Here you can find a list of some Git, GitHub and GitGuardian specific terms and concepts that we use across our documentation.
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Author vs Committer- The author is the person who originally wrote the work
- The committer is the person who most recently applied a set of changes, for example by using commands such as
rebase
orcherry-pick
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CommitA commit is a Git object first and "is an individual change to a file (or set of files)". See the GitHub glossary for a more precise definition. Commits usually contain a commit message which is a brief description of what changes that were made, as well as two distinct users, the author and the committer
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Commit authorThe Git user who makes the commit.
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Commit shaUnique identifier of a commit created by Git. It is a 40-character checksum hash. For the sake of convenience, only the first 7 characters are usually displayed.
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Custom webhooksCustom webhooks allow you to build dedicated integration to receive different type of events (like incidents) from GitGuardian. It provides a way to integrate your different services with the GitGuardian alerting pipeline.
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GitHub contributorA contributor is a GitHub user who does not have collaborator access to a repository but has contributed to a project and had a pull request they opened merged into the repository.
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GitHub eventsEvery interaction between a user and GitHub is logged in a GitHub Event. The complete list of event types is available here It contains useful information, such as:
- the actor, the GitHub user who triggered the event (in the case of a
PushEvent
, i.e when pushing several commits on GitHub, the actor is also referred to as the pusher) - the organization id, if the event occurred on a GitHub organization
- the payload which depend on the event's type
- the repo on which the event happened
- the type
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GitHub organizationGitHub organizations are a group of multiple users that typically mirror the structure of your real-world organization. GitGuardian can monitor as many GitHub organizations and scan their associated activity.
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Git users vs GitHub UsersA commit as defined in the Git protocol, contains both an author
and committer
, defined by their email address and name.
For example "Author Name <user@example.com>"
is a valid git user (either a committer or an author).
This email is configured at the git protocol level, on your developers’ computers, using the commands:
git config --global user.name "FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME"
git config --global user.email "MY_NAME@MY_DOMAIN.com"
On top of that, GitHub sometimes adds a GitHub author and / or committer, if it managed to link the git user to an existing GitHub user, based on the email addresses. In that case, the commit also contains a GitHub login as the author and / or the committer.
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Patch and diffA patch/diff is a git concept that represents the difference in changes between two commits, or saved changes. The diff will visually describe what was added or removed from a file since its last commit.
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PolicyA policy is a rule enforced on your perimeter. Policy breaks incidents are triggered when an event breaks a given policy.
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Push EventA Push Event is triggered whenever several commits are pushed on GitHub, from a local repository, and therefore its payload contains a list of commits. That is the main type of event we monitor, since it is the one containing commits, reflecting changes in code.
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RepositoryFollowing GitHub's definition, a repository is the most basic element of GitHub. They are the easiest to imagine as a project's folder. A repository contains all of the project files (including documentation), and stores each file's revision history. Repositories can have multiple collaborators and can be either public or private.
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SecretA secret is any of the following: API keys, database connection strings, certificates.