Glossary¶

The following key terms are used throughout this document.

CI/CD - The practice of automatically building, testing, and publishing a project every time a change is pushed, rather than as a separate manual step. See the Acronyms entry for the expansion.

Cascading Style Sheets - The language used to control the visual appearance (colours, spacing, fonts, layout) of a web page, kept separate from its content. See the Acronyms entry for the expansion.

Personal access token - A long, randomly generated code that acts as a substitute for a password, scoped to a single purpose and revocable at any time without changing your main account credentials. See the Acronyms entry for the expansion.

Portable Document Format - A fixed-layout document format that looks the same regardless of the software, hardware, or operating system used to open it. See the Acronyms entry for the expansion.

Secure Shell - An encrypted network protocol used to authenticate with, and send commands to, a remote computer - most commonly used here to connect securely to GitLab or GitHub without typing a password each time. See the Acronyms entry for the expansion.

Fenced code block - A block of code set apart from the surrounding text by a line of three or more backticks before and after it, optionally labelled with a language name for syntax highlighting.

Markdown - A lightweight markup language for formatting plain text, using a simple, readable syntax that converts into HTML for web publishing.

Repository - The complete collection of a project's files and their full history of changes, tracked by Git and stored on a service such as GitLab or GitHub.

Static site generator - A tool that converts a set of source files (such as Markdown) into a complete website of plain HTML pages ahead of time, rather than generating each page on demand when a visitor requests it.

Version control - A system for recording changes to a set of files over time, so you can review the history, compare versions, and revert to an earlier one if needed.