Glossary

Terms that appear throughout the guide and the app.

• Microservice (micro): a launchable repository. It’s described by an autogenerated manifest.
• Manifest: the description of how to start a micro (technology, ports, infrastructure, dependencies, startup). Autodetected; you just review it.
• Stack: a micro’s technology (quarkus, spring-boot, node, angular, python). It determines how it starts, where its health is and how configuration is injected into it.
• Scenario: a set of micros launched together to test a flow.
• Dependency: a core that a micro calls over REST. It’s resolved as local, cloud or mock.
• Infrastructure (infra): common Kafka, Redis and PostgreSQL, in Docker.
• Execution mode: each micro runs native (fast, for the one you’re working on) or in a container (isolated, for the background ones).
• Environment check (doctor): the report of whether you have what you need to launch a scenario —tools, repos, Docker, databases, credentials— before starting.
• Perspective: from where hosts are resolved (the machine or a container); it determines which address is injected to each client.
• Advertised listener: address Kafka announces to its clients; it must be reachable from where the client runs (hence the compose’s dual listener).
• Effective port: the real port assigned after resolving collisions. Micros declare their port (e.g. 8080) and MicroLab remaps it at launch if needed.
• Remote manifest / effective configuration: the final value of each of a micro’s properties and which layer it comes from (the repo’s application.yml, the remote configuration or what MicroLab injects at startup).
• Workspace: the base folder that contains the micros’ repositories.
• .microlab/: the folder where a project’s MicroLab configuration lives (scenarios, mocks, databases, local settings, runtime state).
• Startup customization (run override): local, non-versioned settings for a micro’s native startup (properties, arguments, database…).
• Pre-commands (preCommands): what runs before starting a micro (build workspace libraries, install sibling modules of a Maven multi-module…). They live in the manifest: valid for the whole team.
• Bundle: a self-contained file with a scenario (or the whole catalog) to share it or move it to another machine.
• Capability: what your license lets you use: app, cli, mcp, chat.
• Control server: the local HTTP API (with a token) that the process hosting the engine publishes; it’s what the CLI uses to talk to an already-live engine.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): the protocol by which MicroLab exposes a curated surface of tools to AI agents.
• Copilot: the chat inside the app, with the same tools as the MCP.