Concepts

The object model and vocabulary the rest of the documentation assumes.

Origin

The origin is the kvellman installation you run: the admin UI, the winget Source API, and installer delivery. One origin is a complete, self-contained system — everything else in these docs (sites, nodes, users) is configured on top of it.

Package, version, manifest

A package has a stable identifier (e.g. Vendor.App) and one or more versions. Each version's manifest describes it in the shapes winget itself defines — installers, switches, dependencies — and is stored as structured data, not as files on disk.

Upstream and overlay

When you import a package, its original manifest is kept untouched as the upstream state. Any change you make lives as an overlay on top of it, so you can always see the difference from upstream and reset back to it.

Overlay template

An overlay template generalizes one overlay into a reusable rule — for example, an installer URL rewritten with $VERSION/$ARCH placeholders — and applies it automatically to every future version of that package, so you don't repeat the same edit by hand each release.

Approval

A version is only returned to clients once it's approved. This is enforced by the API itself, not just hidden in the UI — an unapproved version simply isn't in the results winget receives, however it got into the catalogue.

Site and site token

A site is a named context: a name, a location, a default locale, a repository URL. Its token is its address — clients reach it at https://your-origin/api/<site-token>. A site's values resolve placeholders inside installer URLs, so one manifest can serve every location correctly. A site is not a tenant, not a separate catalogue, and nothing is installed anywhere to create one — see Sites.