Architecture (arc42)

This is denver’s architecture documentation, structured after arc42. The rest of doc/ answers how do I configure this; these twelve chapters answer why is denver built this way — what problem it solves, what constrained the design, which decisions were taken deliberately, and what is known to be weak about the result.

#	Chapter	Answers
1	Introduction and Goals	What denver is for, who uses it, which qualities it optimizes
2	Architecture Constraints	What was fixed before any design choice was made
3	Context and Scope	Where denver stops and the tools it drives begin
4	Solution Strategy	The handful of ideas the whole design follows from
5	Building Block View	The static structure: modules, providers, config resolution
6	Runtime View	What actually happens during a run
7	Deployment View	How denver ships and where its state lives
8	Cross-cutting Concepts	Mechanisms no single building block owns
9	Architecture Decisions	The decision records, with their context and consequences
10	Quality Scenarios	The quality goals, made concrete and checkable
11	Technical Risks	Known risks and technical debt
12	Glossary	The terms these chapters use precisely

Note

Reading order, if you are new: chapter 1 for the problem, chapter 4 for the five ideas that answer it, then chapter 5 for the code that implements them. Chapters 2, 3, 7, 10, 11 are reference material; read them when a specific question sends you there.

These chapters describe the design; they do not restate the schema or the CLI. Where a chapter names a key or a flag, it links to the page that owns its full reference:

• Configuration — every denver.yml key, the complete merge and resolution rules.

• Arguments — every CLI flag.

• Providers — one page per provider, its keys, and what --fast/--force mean for it.

• Philosophy — the same principles as chapter 4, stated as principles rather than as architecture.

• Glossary — the user-facing vocabulary; chapter 12 is the architecture-facing subset of it.