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manifest

Since v1.2.0 · Top-level declaration

Grammar​

manifest <Name> {
    resources: [<Res1>, <Res2>, ...]      # required — declared resources to mount
    fabric: <FabricRef>                    # required — host substrate
    region: "<region>"                     # optional — manifest-level region override
    zones: <integer>                       # optional — manifest-level zone override
    compliance: [<Tag1>, <Tag2>, ...]      # optional — manifest-level compliance tags
}

manifest bundles a deployable unit — the resources to mount, the fabric to mount them on, the compliance frameworks the whole bundle attests against. A manifest is what observe watches, what reconcile corrects drift on, and what the runtime treats as the unit of deployment.

This is the smallest unit a v1.2.0+ AXON program can ship: one manifest is one deployable. Multi-manifest programs are common (staging + production; per-tenant; per-region) and the runtime treats them independently.

Surface​

manifest is a top-level declaration. It is not nested inside another primitive.

manifest ProductionHealthcare {
    resources:   [EHRDatabase, TrialArchive, InferenceEngine]
    fabric:      ClinicalCloud
    region:      "eu-west-1"
    zones:       3
    compliance:  [HIPAA, GDPR, GxP, SOC2]
}

The region is EU because the bundle declares GDPR, and a compliance tag can bind a jurisdiction. Deploying this same bundle to us-east-1 is refused at compile time:

axon-E042 compliance/jurisdiction: manifest 'ProductionHealthcare' declares
compliance 'gdpr', which binds data to the Eu jurisdiction, but provider 'aws'
region 'us-east-1' is NonEu. The deployment would move regulated data out of
the jurisdiction the tag promises to keep it in

HIPAA, GxP and SOC2 bind no region, so they impose no constraint here.

Fields​

resources: (required)​

A bracketed list of identifiers — every resource the manifest mounts. Each name must resolve to a declared resource at parse time. Order is not significant for mounting (the runtime topologically sorts by dependency); it IS significant for audit-row ordering (first-listed appears first).

fabric: (required)​

A single identifier referencing the fabric the manifest deploys onto. Exactly one fabric per manifest — multi-fabric deployments require multiple manifests.

region: / zones: (optional)​

Manifest-level overrides of the fabric's region/zones. Common when one fabric backs deployments in multiple regions — declare the fabric once, set per-manifest region overrides.

compliance: (optional)​

A bracketed list of identifiers from the closed compliance catalogue. Manifests typically carry the union of every resource's compliance tags plus any additional bundle-level attestations. A HIPAA-only resource under a compliance: [HIPAA, GDPR] manifest gains GDPR coverage by construction (the audit chain records both tags on every emission).

Runtime behaviour​

manifest lowers to a ManifestDefinition IR node. At deploy time, the runtime:

  1. Resolves the fabric: reference and acquires the substrate.
  2. Mounts each listed resource against the substrate.
  3. Cross-validates compliance tags — a resource tagged HIPAA under a manifest tagged only SOC2 emits an axon-E042 compliance downgrade error.
  4. Sets up the audit channel with (manifest.name, fabric.provider, region) baked into every row's preamble.

observe declarations are from a manifest (e.g. observe ClinicalHealth from ProductionHealthcare {…}), so the manifest is the natural unit of monitoring.

What this primitive is NOT​

  • Not deployment automation. A manifest declares what should be deployed; the actual provisioning happens upstream. AXON validates the manifest matches what the runtime finds; it does not create infrastructure.
  • Not a fabric. A fabric is the substrate; a manifest is what's deployed onto a substrate.
  • Not a compose. Manifests do not "instantiate" via service-mesh-style composition — they describe a typed topology that the runtime mounts.

See also​

  • axon://primitives/resource — what resources: lists.
  • axon://primitives/fabric — what fabric: references.
  • axon://primitives/observe — what watches a manifest.
  • axon://primitives/reconcile — what corrects drift against a manifest.
  • axon://compliance/hipaa — example of compliance propagation through the manifest layer.