These pages explain how Fluid Forge works and why. They are explanation, not steps: to build something, start with Getting Started; to look up a field or a flag, use the contract reference or the CLI reference.
The one idea underneath them all: the contract is the source of truth. Schema validation, the plan, the cloud resources, the access rules and the checks fluid verify runs are all derived from one contract you control, written as one file or as a root plus fragments.
Each page builds on the ones before it.
| Page | What it explains |
|---|
| What is a contract | The required top-level fields (fluidVersion, kind, id, name, metadata, exposes), how fluidVersion selects the schema, and what the CLI does with the document. |
| Contract fragments | Writing one product as a root contract plus fragment files: the layout fluid split writes and which commands read it. |
Composing a contract with $ref | How a single $ref is resolved, and the ref root that confines which files a fragment may come from. |
| Builds, exposes, bindings | The three main blocks of a contract: how data is produced, what the product offers, and where it lands. |
| Page | What it explains |
|---|
| Providers vs platforms | The difference between a binding.platform value and the provider plugin that handles it. |
| Workspaces | fluid.workspace.yaml: how chained products find each other, which environments a product has, and what contract SQL may read. |
| Environments and overlays | How --env picks an overlay that patches the base contract for a stage (dev, prod) or a cloud (aws, gcp). |
| OpenTofu state | Where fluid apply keeps state for a cloud contract, the per-provider key, and which commands read it. |
| Page | What it explains |
|---|
| Quality, SLAs and lineage | Data-quality rules (dq.rules), SLAs (qos), and lineage declared in the contract and then checked. |
| Governance and policy | accessPolicy.grants, column restrictions and masking, and which command does what with them. |
| Governance parity | Retention, encryption, column restrictions and grants declared once and enforced on AWS and on GCP, and what fluid verify checks on each. |
| Sovereignty | Where data may live: enforcementMode, and the provision-time and query-time gates. |
| Agent policy | exposes[].policy.agentPolicy: which AI models may read an expose, and for what. |
| Page | What it explains |
|---|
| The semantic layer | Measures, dimensions and metrics declared in exposes[].semantics, and the three parts of the CLI that read them. |
| Product types | metadata.productType (SDP, ADP, CDP) beside the medallion layer, and the consumes[] composition rules fluid validate checks. |
| Consuming products from another mesh | Pinning an upstream contract that lives in another repository or catalog, and what apply does when it changes. |
| The CLI and the Command Center | What fluid publish and fluid apply send to a FLUID Command Center, and how to turn reporting off. |
| Page | What it explains |
|---|
| Fluid Forge vs alternatives | Where Forge overlaps with dbt, Terraform, Airflow, OPA and Snowpark, and where it does not fit. |