Glossary of Terms

Welcome to the Glossary of Terms documentation!

As you explore the Rumour CLI ecosystem, you will encounter specific terminology used to describe the architecture and execution model. This glossary defines those core concepts.

Node

A single, executable API request. In Rumour, a node is defined entirely by a single .toml file. During execution, Rumour parses these files into internal node structures.

Suite

A collection of nodes executed together in a single run. A suite is typically defined by executing Rumour against an entire directory (e.g., rumour run ./my_tests/).

Variable Extraction

The process of dynamically parsing an HTTP response (usually a JSON body or a Header) using the [extract] block, and storing the resulting value in Rumour's global memory.

Interpolation

The act of injecting a variable from global memory into a request definition using the double-brace syntax ({{variable_name}}).

Hard Healing

A specific self-healing mode (-X) where Rumour reacts to a 404 Not Found failure by recursively climbing up the DAG to locate the node that created the missing resource, re-executing the creator node, and then seamlessly resuming the failed request.

Soft Healing

The default healing mode (-H) where Rumour uses exponential backoff and intelligent retry logic to recover from transient network drops, TCP timeouts, and 503 Service Unavailable or 429 Too Many Requests status codes.

Pre-flight Audit

The phase of execution before any network requests are sent. During pre-flight, Rumour parses all files, constructs the DAG, checks for circular dependencies, and attempts to resolve all variables to ensure there are no missing dependencies that would cause runtime crashes.

Vault

The local, encrypted file (.rumour/vault.enc) managed by the rumour vault CLI command. It securely stores sensitive tokens (like production API keys) so they don't have to be hardcoded into .env.toml files or pushed to version control.